Ep. 305: Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” (Part One)

0:07 Dylan: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point said, I'm doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 305 is something like, what is the role of violence in the teleology of the world? For this discussion we read the 1985 novel Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the west by Cormac McCarthy. This is Dylan Casey protecting my thrapple in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:34 Mark: This is Seth Paskin with my shadow contorted on the broken terrain in front of me like a creature seeking its own form.

0:41 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, like a raggedy man wandering from Sun Garden where I used to frighten birds. All right, you gotta love all these similes. I actually found a website that listed every single simile in the book because there are so many over the top, you know, and it's just like after a certain point you're like, God, can you really get away with this as a writer?

1:03 Mark: Totally.

1:04 Dylan: We've done another Cormac McCarthy book years ago, no country for Old Men. This one is the one that I guess made him famous over and above sort of the in the know type famous that he had before this book. Did he write this when he had the MacArthur grant? He got it before he thanks the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

1:27 Wes: And he did a lot of research and work for this too. So he used his yes grant money wisely, I think, including traversing the whole route maybe more than once. But everything he describes in here is firsthand knowledge, all of the flora and fauna and all that stuff.

1:43 Dylan: So the book itself is historically inspired. There are characters in there. The Glanton gang was a real gang that marauded in the Southwest, hired as scalp hunters by a Mexican governor to kill Apaches. And they also became a marauding gang for the better part of a year or two in the Southwest, killing the

2:09 Wes: people they're supposed to protect, basically killing

2:11 Dylan: just about anybody in a kind of wanton nihilistic orgy of violence which is depicted in the book. So the book is a notoriously difficult book to read because of that.

2:23 Wes: The Source is My Confession by Sam Chamberlain, which I recommend people read read. It's really a gripping account.

2:32 Dylan: The narrative starts with this 15 year old character who's only the kid through the whole book.

2:40 Wes: Well, he becomes the Man. Near the end they'll start being referred to as the man, but I forgot about that. But it is just a very brief part of the end. But yeah.

2:49 Dylan: So the kid leaves home from Tennessee and sort of makes his way west. He ends up getting in trouble with the law. He gets let out of jail on the benefit of becoming part of Glanton's gang. And then there is a long section of marauding and then antics ensue. That would be one way of putting it. And then there's also. Also true to history, there is a commandeering and series of massacres at the ferry at Yuma, which is a major crossing point in the southwest to get to the gold rush that Glanton's gang took over. And that's sort of the last stand of the Glanton gang. And then there is the other side of the bookend with the wanderings of the kid who, as Wes mentioned, becomes the man until the end of the book. That fair enough. As a plot summary, at least.

3:50 Wes: A lot of fun.

3:51 Dylan: The language is grippingly beautiful, but it is work. You're going to look up a lot of words if you care about actually knowing them. There are a lot of words to look up, though you'll find out that you get the context pretty quickly. There's a kind of whiff of archaic language in both in the sentence structure and in the vocabulary. Also, just in terms of the way the book is put together, if you haven't read Cormac McCarthy before, he doesn't use any punctuation, save for periods and spaces and paragraphs. So there are no quotes. I guess they're tildes on the Enyas. They're Spanish. That's just straight up Spanish.

4:28 Wes: There's not even punctuation for contractions. Right. So can no contraction.

4:35 Mark: It can be difficult to follow conversations at times because you don't know who's speaking, which is actually one of the virtues of the audiobook was that since the guy was doing different voices for the different characters, those parts are actually much clearer than reading. And the sentences run on. It's unclear whether even with commas or semicolons or hyphens, some of these sentences would be correct grammar.

4:59 Dylan: In addition to having them run on, they also have cases where they're very, very short and punctuated. So there is a ebb and flow of the language itself that, to me, replicates where he's at in the events in the book.

5:16 Wes: Yeah, it's a good way of putting it.

5:18 Mark: And there are constant and relentless use of simile. So everything is like something else, like the mountains, the lake, the people, the mood, the dawn, the dogs. Everything is like something else.

5:35 Wes: Should I give a few.

5:36 Mark: Please.

5:37 Wes: Examples from my list like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. Like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta. Like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. Just choosing these randomly from this list that I have. Like hot scurf blown from some unreckonable forge, howling in the waste and everything's waste, or at the ends of the world, or it's unreckonable, or it's void, or it's, you know, it's similes out into the. It's these very destructive similes, let's say, like some holy wretched baptismal candidate. I actually started to categorize these because some of them are religious and there's a lot of comparisons to raggedy men or people being driven by forces beyond them. So like a raggedy man wandered from some garden where he used to frighten birds. That's the one I used in my intro.

6:27 Dylan: I'm gonna just read a paragraph that's in the middle of the book that I more or less randomly picked.

6:34 Wes: Okay.

6:35 Dylan: Just to give you a feel for some of the language. This is when they're in there going through the southwest with Glanton's gang.

6:42 Wes: Which chapter?

6:44 Dylan: This is beginning of chapter 11. They rode on into the mountains and their way took them through the high pine forest, wind in the trees, lonely bird calls, the shoeless mules psalming through the dry grass and pine needles in the blue coulees of the north slopes, narrow tailings of old snow. They rode of switchbacks through a lonely aspen wood where the fallen leaves lay like golden disclets on the damp black trail. The leaves shifted in a million spangles down the pale corridors, and Glanton took one and turned it like a tiny fan by its stem and held it and let it fall in its perfection not lost on him.

They rode through a narrow draw where the leaves were shingled up in ice, and they crossed a high saddle at sunset where the wild doves were rocketing down the wind and passing through the gap a few feet off the ground, veering wildly among the ponies and dropping off down into the blue gulf below. They rode on into a dark fir forest, the little Spanish ponies sucking at the thin air. And just at dusk, as Glanton's horse was clamoring over a fallen log, a lean blonde bear rose up out of the swale on the far side where had been feeding and looked down on them with dim pig's eyes.

7:51 Mark: The pig's eyes thing comes up a couple times in the book. And the other thing is he frequently refers to them as apes, like with an ape eyes or ape mouth.

8:02 Wes: The people.

8:04 Dylan: You just reminded me that this bear and bears show up. I'm now realizing three times. The first bear, the last bear, and then this bear show up three times.

8:17 Wes: But wait, the first bear.

8:18 Dylan: There's a bear at the beginning. Before the kid becomes part of the

8:22 Mark: Glanton gang, there might be a fourth bear, too. There's a point where they're looking down and they see a bunch of bears down in a valley. When they crest a right, that's actually

8:32 Wes: later he's the kid's at the carnival

8:35 Dylan: and there's a bear killed at the carnival, which to me, this is the third time I read the book. I'd forgotten about the bear at the end in Griffin that gets killed in the saloon.

8:45 Mark: Yep.

8:45 Wes: And if you thought the book was sort of hallucinogenic up to that point, then it really goes off the rails

8:51 Dylan: and you're on drugs. And by the time you get to the last paragraph.

8:55 Wes: Yeah. It's like, here's an extra shot of lsd.

Yeah.

8:59 Dylan: But Holden is referred to as having pig's eyes. I hadn't noticed that till I just read this. And then Seth brought up the commonality of pig's eyes, which having the destructive bear have the same kind of eyes as Holden. That means something.

9:16 Mark: Another thing about the book that's worth mentioning is it's unclear who the narrator is. Sometimes it seems like it's the kid, or maybe it starts off and it feels like maybe the kid is narrating at points or it's the kid's narrative. But then there seems to be kind of a third person narrative. And because of the way he writes, if a character is leading, like the judge, when he speaks and he discourses on, or not discourses, he sort of pontificates about religion or the nature of the universe or whatever. There's no sense in which somebody who was narrating this from memory, like if this was somebody's story or biography, would be able to remember those passages or whatever.

So it almost becomes like whoever the speaker is becomes the narrative voice as well. And that's part of the push and pull of the book. You're kind of drawn into different perspectives and yet at the same time, you're kind of inhabiting this wasteland world from the perspective of this disembodied narrator. It's very unsettling. The book is very hard to read, very hard to tolerate. That being said, McCarthy's use of language is beautiful and at the same time, it's like, how can you be beautiful and tedious at the same time and economical and egregious at this?

You know, like, it's. It's very tiring to read these descriptions.

10:47 Wes: Yeah, it's exciting in the beginning. I think it does get tiring towards the end where it's, oh, my God, another one of these similes.

But.

And it's also. There's a lot of description of landscape and wandering.

10:58 Dylan: You feel the wandering.

11:00 Wes: I mean, the overall effect is wonderful. And so maybe smaller doses and reading the book more slowly than I read it this time. I read it in a couple of days and then reread it, taking notes. And then it's possible, I think, to overdose on this very easily. You need to pace yourself. But should we talk to. I like the way Dylan framed the opening question. That's kind of what I focused in on as. Well. Maybe it's obvious, but I didn't know someone else would focus on it in the same way. But just this question of the role of violence and the teleology of the world, is that the way you put it?

11:31 Dylan: That's what I said, yeah.

11:33 Wes: In the figure of the judge, we have a very opinionated person with a philosophical thesis. It's a very convenient book for a podcast like this. And it's a thesis about destiny and about violence and war and the role

11:48 Dylan: of human beings in it and the role of human beings with the relation of human beings with the world.

11:52 Wes: Yeah, part of the thesis. It's kind of an anti. I know that. I think Nietzsche comes up a lot in the relation to this book, but it's really an anti Nietzsche thesis. So there's a point. I'll just say this just as an

overall sketch and we'll get into more

detail, but the thesis is that the only source of agency is violence, as opposed to what we're used to philosophically, which is the only source of agency is morality. That's the classic philosophical thesis about autonomy. And then you get this relationship to Nietzsche. So there's a pretty explicit allusion in chapter 11, where judge. I have in my notes as Judge is anti Nietzsche. But the judge says the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. And then there's stuff about games and let him, you know, let him play for high stakes where violence and war are sort of the highest stake of game.

And the way, just to give people a taste of the passage that's being referred to, I think it's from the allusion to a meridian, the sun being at the highest point in the sky, or to noon or high. It's really, it's high noon. If the allusion is to Nietzsche, it's an allusion to this is the way Nietzsche puts it. And it is the great noon when man stands at the midpoint of his course between beast and superman and celebrates his way to the evening as his highest hope. For it is the way to a new morning. And that, you know, in other passages in Ecce Homo this comes up a lot.

But my life task is to prepare for humanity one supreme moment in which it can come to its senses. A great noon in which it will turn its gaze backwards and forwards, in which it will step from under the yoke of accident and of priests, and for the first time set the question of the why and the wherefore of humanity as a whole. So for Nietzsche, this noon is a forward looking moment and a backward looking moment where we overcome nihilism. And that includes this reference to accident. It's a nihilism of both science and morality, the life attacking or the anti natural sorts of valuations.

And we come up with a new set of valuations which is aesthetic ultimately, or at least is in part aesthetic. So in this case there's sort of an inversion of that where we get this idea that we're not on our way to some higher form of life, but we're on our way to some horrible destiny in which the only redemptive thing, the only thing by which we can redeem some sense of agency is violence.

14:26 Dylan: And Holden, definitely, he's the priest of that.

14:30 Wes: Yeah, that which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

14:35 Mark: Yeah, that theme of violence. So my experience maybe a third of the way into the book was that this was a fictionalized version of part of that history of genocide book that I was reading. The thesis of the book is that not just situationally in the west, that our narrative of manifest destiny and the American narrative about itself and whatever is this is the counter narrative that is probably much more akin. If you read histories as written by what did we learn to call them? Indian. Native Indians. Native American.

15:14 Wes: Native Americans. I mean, I think Indians is okay now too.

15:17 Mark: Indians, yeah. Their experience is much more akin to this and the narratives are much closer to this. But the broader thesis is that violence is the state of human existence and that's whether you choose to be violent or not. It exists in the human space and that human beings perpetrate violence on each other. And rather than lamenting that Fact. Right. Or imposing a moral narrative against it. The judge is saying it's perfectly natural and it's, in fact, the only way to get to something like self knowledge or self awareness. The only way to fulfill your destiny accurately is to embrace war and perpetrate violence and do it with a certain kind of attitude.

Right. Not just unwillingly. I mean, that's kind of the rub with the kid, is that the kid never fully embraces just the pure viciousness and nihilism of the Glanton gang the way the other characters other than the ex priest do. And I have a hard time arguing against that fact. If you look at the history of human behavior and the history of this type of violence that has been perpetrated on so many different peoples in so many places by so many others, it's hard to argue that he's wrong about this.

16:34 Wes: It's also violence that. Right. Is foundational in the sense that it. It's violence that usually, you know, it's the kind of activity that has to do with the founding of nations and societies.

Right.

The establishment of borders. The establishment of nations.

16:47 Dylan: Yes.

16:48 Wes: So it's the state of nature, negotiation, so to speak, of these little bubbles in which nation states in which violence is supposed to largely be controlled. Right. Inside the bubble, there's. There are norms and there's. There's ethics and there's the law, and people aren't typically engaged in mass murder. But the thing outside of that, that founds it is something that itself is violent. Which is why I think, you know, with our law episodes, you see this early positivist conception of the law where the law is habitual obedience to a sovereign who obeys no one else.

And it's obedience because of fear. Right. Fear of violence. And then the reason why that doesn't work is Hart comes along and says, well, you know, what's the difference between that and, like, being afraid of a gang or being afraid of some criminal who's ordering you to do something? Norms themselves have to be accepted. People have to obey them, not just because they fear them, but because in sense. In some sense, they expect them. But anyway, so we're always confronted with this paradox about having to do with the state monopoly on violence in the service of peace or order or moral norm.

18:02 Dylan: Yeah, but it's no coincidence that this book, and probably these events, insofar as they're historical, take place in an essentially lawless area. It's a border area in political structure, in settlement, in all those ways that give maybe civilization, civilizing in the sort of natural meaning of having civil life. There is no civil life of any real import. There's gestures towards it. There's a governor in Mexico, but it doesn't have any of the strength of something like law, doesn't exist in any way. And I think that Holden is an example in particular. Glanton probably as well, but that they just wouldn't exist anywhere else. Holden in particular gravitates towards this place. Right. I forget if we have any history about where he's from, but the fact that he's there is in perfect concert with his outlook on the world.

19:03 Wes: It's a place where he can be himself.

19:05 Dylan: Yeah, that's true.

19:06 Mark: It's true. And in fact, Glanton, there's a very brief moment in the book where they head back northeast and they come to the border of Texas or what, I guess Texas territory. I don't know what it was at the time.

19:19 Dylan: This is right around the Mexican American War.

19:21 Mark: Yeah. So Glanton refuses to cross the border. And it's funny because, you know, he's such a violent and possessed man that the idea, he says, if I cross, I'll be arrested. It's almost like the border is like a magical barrier that he can't approach or he can't cross. You know, it's. Because it's a very strange moment where he's like, why would he be afraid? He's not afraid of anybody else or any other authority. It was a very strange moment to me. But it also suggests just what you're talking about, Dylan, that they inhabit this land where he has power, and if they go into the lawful land or get out of this wilderness or this unsettled area, that he would lose his power in some respect or he would lose his. Lose his sense of self somehow.

20:06 Wes: It's interesting because it's a very evanescent power because they're so reckless, right? They're going to get caught. There's just no way. There's a complete.

20:14 Dylan: They get decimated. Right. Themselves, I mean, even in this world of violence, right.

20:18 Wes: You know, they had a pretty good deal where they could go out and get a bunch of scalps for money and they could even as they do, you know, murder peaceful Indian villages, men, women, children, Mexican villages.

And then.

But it's when they start going to patrol Mexican villages and. Yeah, that's random people. And then getting in fights with soldiers as well. Obviously, they know that that puts a time limit on their activities. Right. There's only so long they can get away with what they're doing. And relatedly, what is it that motivates them? Right? I mean, ostensibly, it's gold and greed and all that. But most of what they're doing is not very pleasant. Most of what they're doing is trekking through the desert, horses dying and being hungry, horrible stuff happening. And then they get into a town and they get drunk and whoop it up. But that's a small part of their experience. And you think at some point they would retire with the gold instead of killing Mexicans and basically sealing their fate?

21:16 Dylan: Well, I think it's a really good question. The way you were talking about just a second ago made me sit up because you said that basically they're making bad decisions and they know it. And I don't think that they know that.

21:29 Wes: Captain Glanton, I'd like to talk to you about your decisions.

21:36 Dylan: Well, the fact that that's so funny to me only proves out the point that they don't have a plan except in a kind of moment to moment. The one who might have something like a plan, which is closer to a way of being would be Holden, but he doesn't have ambition in the same. And Glanton and the rest of the gang, they're like riding a wave of some sort, you know, like a kind of deep opportunism. And it's very localized, like, we need to have some money and get some stuff. And part of it is, I think that there's a sadistic quality to them that they enjoy certain aspects of this.

22:14 Wes: Many of the landscape images make it seem like they're being driven, right? And in a way, they're being driven by the sun. They're following the arc of the sun right westward. And this is the whole Manifest Destiny thing, where destiny lines up with the trajectory of the sun toward the west. This is a way. It is a riff, you know, I think, as Seth mentions, a riff on the concept of Manifest destiny and the idea of being driven to do what they're doing. But, you know, there are many, many images which suggest this. So one of them involves the sun producing shadows which will bind them like tentacles to the darkness yet to come.

And there are other images like that. Shadows often become tethers. They become things that bind. So you have this image of this almost like a forced march through the desert and through all these events by something that's beyond their control. And yet it's supposed to be somehow the only possible expression of agency, submitting to this historical absolute, as the judge calls it.

23:20 Mark: Yeah, there definitely is Some kind of compulsion. And we know that Glanton and the initial members of his gang, when they pick up the kid were soldiers. So they're accustomed to war. I guess they feel like they don't want to reintegrate into society. But also they clearly enjoy the activity of fighting and warring mercenaries gets used

23:41 Dylan: and filibusters gets used, both of which are very similar terms.

23:45 Mark: The only thing I would mention about what you said, Wes, is that it's not as linear that they're being driven forward to something because they do circle back and backtrack. I mean, there's one passage that I just thought of in reference to that where it says something like they rode through the town and doffed their hats to people who a few days later, they would slaughter or something like that. And it's not suggested in that that they had a plan to return back or something, or that they were even aware at the time. It's just how it plays out.

And, of course, the brown and toadvine go to San Diego and return. There's several things in San Diego that take place. And then I think we also have to reckon with the fact that even though we talked about that this land being where the Judge inhabits his full powers in Glanton and so forth, the book does end with them in Griffin in Texas, in quote, unquote, civilization.

24:37 Dylan: It's like Sodom and Gomorrah, though, right? Griffin is characterized as like.

24:41 Mark: Yes, it is characterized that way. And, of course, there's violence.

24:45 Wes: Can I read some of these passages? Let me start with one. Just some of the passages that kind of unite the landscape and the concept of being driven to a destiny. One of them I just kind of alluded to. So this is in chapter four, after he's just gotten in with the Glanton gang. They rode on, and the sun in the east flushed pale streaks of light. And then a deeper run of color like blood, seeping up in sudden reaches, flaring plane wise. And where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation, the top of the sun rose out of nothing, like the head of a great red phallus, until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them, the shadows of the small stone lay like pencil lines across the sand, and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them.

Elongate as an adjective. I like that. Elongate before them like strands of the night from which they'd ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come. So you get this image of the sun rising in the background, and it's almost like there's a solar wind pushing them. Right. We're used to the concept of the sun as a God, but in this case, it's a devilish creature, a malevolent God and a phallic God. And the shadows that, you know, are produced are binding in a way. They point to the west and they point to the future. It's a temporal metaphor, and they bind us to the future.

There's lots of talk in here about, you know, ultimately, destiny is involving it's determinism, philosophically, it's being caught up in this causal matrix of being creatures who are determined by the forces that make us and push us forward. And then the question is, do we have any agency in light of that? And that's kind of a problem that's posed at the very beginning of the book. Whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. This is the way it's put for the kid in Nacogdoches.

This is what he's going to try to figure out. There's many, many passages like this in which the landscape and the natural forces are driving forces.

26:54 Dylan: There are. But this beginning one is, I think, particularly important because I think it's the most extended time. They barely survive this. Right. Just after the kid joins them. It's many, many, many days. It's not the Badlands, but it's basically desolation. They have several of their party die along the way. They barely make it to water kind of thing. And it makes me think about the way in which that kind of survival informs this question of violence in the world, the question of battle and war, that experience that survival, even the way it's portrayed in the section you read that travel through it. Do we interpret it as, in part, the world itself is a place of natural violence against us. That the individuals, Glanton and the gang, they are fighting, in that case, with the world itself.

27:45 Mark: Yeah, I was actually just thinking the same thing, Dylan. It's as if not necessarily the world in kind of a broad sense, but specifically. Specifically the landscape and nature is a character that is perpetrating violence, whether it's lack of water or the wind. You know, there's many, many descriptions of wind whipping and snow freezing, the rocks burning. There's one point where they have to walk through this crevice or past this cliff, and they have to turn their backs because the heat radiating off of it is. And of course the judge is bald.

And there's lots of stuff about him having to wear a hat and, you know, how he's sunburned and so forth. And, you know, the bears. Well, one of the bears is violent, but typically you don't see the depiction of the animals being violent. Like, there's lots of talk of wolves throughout the book, but they don't shoot the wolves. And the wolves kind of just trail back and are trying to pick up scraps or whatever. You don't see a lot of predator, prey kind of descriptions of nature. So it's not a suggestion that nature in itself, but really the landscape where the land is violent and their very survival is a struggle.

28:50 Dylan: That's a really good point. That there is a kind of absence of animal violence. And they're trying to say, well, you know, the world is just intrinsically violent place, it's a state of war everywhere. There's a way in which I would expect to see examples reflected in the natural world of predatory animals.

29:09 Wes: Yeah, we only get the bear attack and then we get the horse fight. And it's Glanton's horse. You know, the implication is that his horse has taken on some of his character because it has become violent. And so it bites the ear of an Apache horse while they're trying, trying to negotiate with the Apaches outside Tucson. And that's all that I can remember.

29:27 Mark: There's a bloodbat that jumps on. I can't remember, like a spruel. That's about it. You're right. And the other thing that's interesting, Dylan, is that he does not use that type of trope in the similes. So you don't see like a lion that's standing over top of a killed prey or like a cheetah stalking or whatever. If there is, I don't recall it.

29:46 Dylan: But it's the landscape and the climate,

29:48 Wes: the weather, which would be more typical, like of a Homeric simile. Right. And we should say that, you know, this is a direct reference, reference back to epic poetry and Homer's similes and formulaic similes that would be repeated throughout the poem.

30:01 Dylan: There's an Iliad like quality in that respect of what are those similes called? They get repeated all the time in the Iliad and the eye, particularly the

30:09 Mark: Iliad, Rosy Fingered Dawn.

30:10 Dylan: Yeah, it's exactly the same phrase over and over again. In fact, in translations they end up getting rewritten with different inflections because it would be too boring for them to be the same all the time. But they are, in Greek, exactly the same every time.

30:26 Wes: I mean, he does have a few animal. And I only know this because I started categorizing they're not compared to animal violence. Chins in the sands like wizards, or the spider like fingers. Spider like among the balls of cotton. Or abdomens like the tracks of giant millipedes or leather wings like dark satanic hummingbirds, stuff like that. But those are definitely outweighed by the similes having to do with natural phenomena.

Maybe.

30:53 Dylan: But is this right that the landscape I'll include more or less the weather is like a character that presents a sort of very violent environment for them, that they're surviving it. It's beating them, that kind of thing. But the violence that they both perpetrate and the violence that they see is presented in just a deeply matter of fact way that doesn't come with the color of the tentacles of the shadows and the portent yet to come and stuff like that. You have a tree of hanging babies like ornaments. It's not described any more than that. That might be enough.

But sometimes the language is so specific. Like my opening. I said that I was protecting my thrapple. This is a reference to when Glanton gets killed and the axe splits, cuts him down through to his thrapple. My experience of the book is it being deeply violent, but in some kind of strange way, not gratuitous. I don't know if that's.

31:58 Wes: I mean, No, I know. I know what you're saying, but it's funny to say it still, but.

32:02 Dylan: So it's not like a horror movie where there's a kind of orgy of gore and a reveling in the obscenity of it.

32:12 Wes: Yeah, he's not Tarantino.

It's not.

Oh, violence is cool and fun, but it's not moralized because it's not a good guy is bad guys, cowboys and Indians thing. And through the eyes of the kid, you do. As Seth points out, it's almost always. It's not in the written with the kid as narrator, but it seems to be from the perspective of the kid. And really it turns out to be there are moments which deviate from that which make it like a third person omniscient thing. But for the most part, it seems within the perspective of the kid. But you don't get a lot of internal reflection until the very end.

So you don't know how the kid is actually reacting to all this violence. You don't know which parts of it he's participating in. The judge in the end will accuse him of holding back and judging them for their immoral deeds. And that'll be the reason. Right way seems to kill the kid in the end, or one of the reasons. But towards the very end of the book, the kid becomes a bit vocal on some various occasions and you start to see evidence of conscience. But for most of the book, it doesn't get off on the violence. You don't get any moral frame for the violence.

The frame is like the desert.

33:21 Dylan: The frame is the desert. That's right.

33:23 Wes: Yeah. The ethical frame is just the void. And so you're stuck as a reader feeling horrified. When I first read this book, the massacre of the Indian villages was just like, I don't even know if I can go on. You don't have any allies. You don't have any compatriots in the book. And your moral reaction to things. And you're just waiting for Clanton to get it right. You're just like, I can't wait till this motherfucker gets. That's what he deserves.

33:47 Dylan: But the book isn't helping you with that at all. That lack of moral frame is really important because it's utterly a lack. I guess that's what we're describing. It's not this sadistic pleasure in the orgy of violence. That's not even the tilt of the book at all either. But it's also not a moralistic frame in which you're going to see the comeuppance of the evildoer.

34:10 Mark: The sparse description of the violence itself doesn't invite you to either condemnation or to revel in it. And because there's no frame, provided you only have the perspective of your current experience, it essentially forces the reflection back on yourself as to how you internalize it. Dylan, you were saying you didn't think it was gratuitous. I absolutely feel like it's gratuitous. But that's a reflection of how I feel about my experience reading it and your experience reading it.

34:39 Wes: It's explicit. And that's another Homeric comparison I think, to make. Right.

34:44 Dylan: Yes.

34:45 Wes: Homer does this as well, describing the violence in great detail. And there are detailed descriptions of this.

34:51 Dylan: I was trying to just come up with the right word that describes the difference. The closest to me is the distinction with a horror movie that it's not even though it's horrible. And by a horror movie, I mean that kind of fetishization of gore and spectacle of violence that doesn't seem to be going on it is horrible. But the matter of factness is the lack of judgmental context that makes it hard to deal with because you have to bring your own awareness. You're like, oh, my God, this is happening. But it also, its matter of factness to me, makes it more powerful and maybe even more unnerving.

Because you mentioned this earlier, you realize that there probably isn't that much that is deeply unique here in the experience of human beings. What's happening with the Glanton gang has happened before. Many, many times. In fact, it's going on all over. This isn't a unique event or unique series of marauding, sadistic outlaws, or maybe outlaws isn't even the right word because there's barely no law there anyway, you

35:59 Wes: know, before they become technically outlaws, they're acting under the auspices of the governor or governors of various regions in Mexico. And this is after the Mexican American War. And there's been ongoing brutality between the Indians and the Mexicans and hundreds. For hundreds of years, basically. And you see them go through Mexican villages which have already been destroyed by the Apaches. This whole scalping, let's give people money for scalps things, which was real, you know, was historical, was an attempt to deal with that, and it went wrong in precisely the way this portrays.

But this level of lawless violence, it's not unique in the sense that it's sort of part and parcel of war. And I mean, read Caesar's Conquest of Gaul, right? And he's like massacring towns of 40,000 people, man, woman and child. So, yeah, I don't know where I'm going with that, but I wanted to say that. Does he make violence look cool in this? In some sense? You know, I think the closest he comes to that is that Legion of Horribles scene, that passage, one of the most famous, where he's with Captain Smith at that point, the kid. And then the Comanches attack, right?

Kind of coming up around from a herd. Legion of Horribles dressed up in all these different trophies from previous people that they've killed, including a wedding dress. You know, one of the Comanches has a wedding veil, is wearing a wedding veil, and another one, like a coat worn backwards. So a legion of Horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes, attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fever 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 a blood stained wedding veil.

And some in headgear of crane feathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo. And one in a pigeon tailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked. And one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with the old blows of mace or saber, done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids sliced 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 of 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 horde from the 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 and where the eye wanders and lip jerks and drools. And then you get this scene of Comanches kill almost everyone in that party and gut them and sodomize them while they're dying and you know, entrails and everything you can imagine.

So I just wanted to get more at the specifics of this question of gratuitousness and also the question of whether it's made to look cool. Because I agree with Dylan that gratuitous isn't quite the right word. But because of the beauty, you know, there's ballet of violence type stuff going on here because of the beauty of the language and because of the magnificence of the. I mean, this legion of horrible scene was so impressive to me. And this is the closest thing to a good guys, bad guys thing because you have Smith, who's a horrible person, has already talked about Indians as degenerate creatures and all these basically out to kill Indians and the Comanches just wipe them out.

It's like the one scene of violence, I think, which is hard not to be a bit gratified by it. And it's before all the other Glanton gang horrible massacres even happen.

39:50 Mark: So I don't want to close on this. I'll save it for the next part. But I want to get to that question about the romanticization or not of violence and the depiction of violence. Because one of the tangents I went off on was why has there never been a film or has anybody ever Tried to make a film version of this and there's a lot of interesting things to say about that.

40:09 Wes: Do you know the story behind that? They've been trying for decades. But also we should really get to the judges speeches and theses about war and all that stuff.

40:18 Dylan: I think both those topics will take up all the rest of part two.

40:21 Mark: And I have one other special topic that I'm going to throw out.

40:24 Dylan: We'll try to wedge it in.

40:26 Mark: Okay, good.

40:27 Dylan: So that's it for part one. If you want to listen to part two right now, go over to partialexaminelife.com and become a citizen. Good night.

40:35 Wes: Good night.