The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Cormac McCarthy · a novel in twenty-three chapters and an epilogue · Random House, 1985 · scored on McCarthy’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Historical novel as epic of conquest; Western, picaresque and gnostic scripture in one narration
Mythos
The judge as archon, war-god and demiurge, who never sleeps and says he will never die; the fallen Adam born under falling stars; the West as the land of evening
Phase
From a Tennessee birth in 1833 through the scalp contracts of 1849 and 1850 to the Colorado crossing in April 1850, then one night at Fort Griffin in 1878
Presentation
Fiction; twenty-three chapters and an epilogue under three epigraphs, each chapter opened by a headnote of its events; no quotation marks, the Spanish untranslated, the protagonist unnamed
Register
From the long scriptural sentence and the judge’s courteous periods to the bare exchanges of the dialogue and the exact names of saddlery, firearms, rock and plant
Scale
One company of scalp hunters, a boy who rides with it, and the borderlands from Texas to the Pacific
Governing Proposition
A runaway boy from Tennessee rides with a company of scalp hunters hired by Mexican governors, through massacre after massacre to the Colorado crossing, beside a vast hairless judge who draws the world in a ledger and destroys what he has drawn; in 1878 the judge finds him again, and the book ends with the judge dancing. The wager of the novel is that the violence of the westward conquest was not an episode in it but its substance, and that a narration which weighs a killing no more than a stone can show that violence as a law older than any nation.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“See the child.” The novel opens on an address, in the present tense, as if a figure were being pointed out in a picture: a boy at a scullery fire in Tennessee, his mother dead in childbirth, his father a drunken schoolmaster who quotes poets no one remembers. The birth is given in a few words: “Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall.” The narration says of the boy what the rest of the book will bear out, “the child the father of the man”. At fourteen he runs. He is never named. He is the kid until the last chapter, and then he is the man.
Around him the book builds twenty-three chapters and an epilogue of one paragraph, set apart from them. Each chapter opens with a headnote, a run of summary phrases in the manner of the nineteenth-century travel narrative, naming the chapter’s events before they happen, so that every massacre is entered in advance like an item in an account. Three epigraphs stand over the whole. Paul Valéry addresses men whose ideas are terrifying and whose hearts are faint, who fear blood more and more, and ends on three words: “Blood and time”. Jacob Boehme holds that the life of darkness is not sunk in sorrow, for sorrow is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness. The third is a news item from the Yuma Daily Sun of 13 June 1982: a fossil skull from northern Ethiopia, three hundred thousand years old, shows on re-examination that it was scalped. The story is dated 1849; the epigraphs date its subject before history.
The calendar holds. Born in 1833, the kid leaves home at fourteen, in 1847; the main action runs through the scalp contracts to April 1850 at the Colorado crossing; the last chapter is set at Fort Griffin, Texas, in 1878, when he is forty-five. The page is as stripped as its hero. There are no quotation marks; speech stands in its own lines or runs into the narration; contractions go without apostrophes; Spanish is left untranslated. Behind the fiction stands a documented company, John Joel Glanton’s, contracted to Mexican state governments in 1849 and 1850 and destroyed by the Quechan at the Colorado crossing in April 1850. The memoir in which the book found it, Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession, first published in 1956, has in the company a Judge Holden: huge, hairless, learned.
Movement II
At Nacogdoches the kid watches a revival preacher, the Reverend Green, broken by a vast hairless man who stands up and accuses him before the congregation of crimes against a child and a goat. The crowd turns on the preacher. In the bar afterwards the accuser, the judge, says he never saw the man before. It is the first thing the book shows him doing, and the pattern of all that follows: a lie told for its effect, a crowd turned, and the teller at his ease. The kid fights Toadvine, a man with no ears and letters branded on his forehead, in the mud, and the two of them burn a hotel.
He is recruited for Captain White’s unauthorised filibuster into Mexico. White tells his men that the Mexicans are a people unfit to govern their land; a Mennonite warns the recruits that the wrath of God lies sleeping. The company crosses the desert, and the Comanche come out of the dust: “a legion of horribles”, dressed in the plundered costume of their raids. The sentence that brings them on runs clause after clause until White’s company has been destroyed inside it. It is the most famous sentence in the book, and it gives the slaughter and the finery the same breath.
The kid survives with a wounded man, Sproule, and the two go on across the desert; a vampire bat bites Sproule. In Chihuahua the kid is jailed, and sees Captain White’s head kept in a jar of mescal. The filibuster set out to take a country on the argument that its people were unfit for it, and its leader’s head is put on show. The book makes no comment on it, and it makes none anywhere. No one in it has learned anything, and the kid goes from the jail into the company that will take him to the Colorado.
Movement III
Toadvine and the kid are freed from the jail into the company of John Glanton, hired to take Apache scalps for bounty. Its members are named: Glanton; the judge; the expriest Tobin; David Brown; two John Jacksons, one black and one white; Delaware trackers; Bathcat, Webster, Irving, Shelby and others. Black Jackson beheads white Jackson at a fire. The company falls on camps of Gileños, then of peaceful Tiguas, and then, because the hair cannot be told apart, of Mexicans, and sells the scalps. The governments that hired it outlaw it. The trade is paid by the piece, and the piece does not record whose head it came from.
Tobin tells the kid how the company first found the judge, sitting alone on a rock in the desert, and how the judge led them, pursued and without powder, to an extinct volcano and made gunpowder there from bat guano, sulphur and charcoal, the men pissing into the mixture at his order. The tale gives him no origin. He is found already there, and the company owes its survival to him; it will owe him its doctrine too.
The judge’s practice is shown again and again. He collects specimens and artifacts, draws them in a ledger, and destroys them. He lectures on geology, law and war; he plays the fiddle and dances; he takes an Apache child onto his knee, and later the child is found scalped. Of the ledger he gives the book’s most exact statement of what he is: “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.” The novel answers him only by its form. Its headnotes enter every event in advance, as his ledger enters every thing, and the book keeps what it enters.
Movement IV
The speeches that give the book its theory come in its middle chapters. The freedom of birds is an insult to the judge. Moral law is an invention for the protection of the weak, and historical law overturns it. War is the ultimate game: “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.” And then, flatly: “War is god.” No one in the company answers him, and the narrator does not answer him either. The book leaves the doctrine standing in the voice of the man who has done most to make it true.
The land is given with the same equality. In the desert’s “optical democracy” no one thing, man or stone, has precedence, and the narration keeps that law, giving a massacre and a storm the same weight and the same words. Alone in the desert at night, the kid sees a lone tree burning, with small creatures gathered to its light. At the Colorado the company takes over the ferry, robs and kills those who use it, and is destroyed by the Quechan. Glanton is killed. The judge lives, and is seen naked with the idiot James Robert Bell on a leash, whom his brother Cloyce had exhibited in a cage, and whom the judge had carried naked out of the river.
The kid and Tobin flee across the desert, pursued by the judge and the idiot. The judge calls to the kid; Tobin urges him to shoot; he does not. The judge’s charge, in substance, is that the kid alone kept some reserve of clemency for the heathen, and so broke faith with the company. It is the one moral fact about the kid that the book allows, and it never explains it. In San Diego the judge visits him in jail and accuses him before the authorities. Toadvine and Brown are hanged in Los Angeles. Freed, the kid wanders for years, and once speaks to an old woman kneeling in a niche of rock, who has long been dead.
Movement V
In 1878, at Fort Griffin, Texas, the kid is forty-five, a man among the buffalo-bone gatherers, and the book now calls him the man. He shoots a boy, Elrod, who threatens him. In a saloon he meets the judge, who has not aged. The judge tells him that only the man who has given himself wholly to war, and seen horror in the round, can dance. A dancing bear is shot.
The man goes out to the jakes. The judge is there, and takes him in his arms. What follows is not told: the book gives only the horror of two men who look in. Having shown everything else, it withholds this. In the saloon the judge dances naked among the fiddlers, “like an enormous infant”, and the chapter ends on him: “He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.” The kid’s story is over. The judge’s has no end in the book.
Then the epilogue, one paragraph set apart. At dawn a man moves across a plain making holes in the ground and striking fire from the rock in each, and others follow behind him, gathering bones. The line of holes runs on across the plain. What he is building the book does not say. The child at the scullery fire stoked a fire; this man strikes one from the stone itself; between them lie a ride that learned nothing and a judge who does not die. The evening redness of the subtitle is the land of sunset the book has crossed, and a civilisation going west toward its decline. The last words are plain: “Then they all move on again.”
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the book resists it more than a picaresque should. Its argument is that violence is not an episode in the conquest of the West but its substance, and the argument is made by repetition: massacre after massacre, ride after ride, nothing learned and nothing ending. Cut the repetition and the argument becomes an anecdote; three massacres chosen would tell a story of escalation the book denies. The set pieces are each required: the revival, the Comanche, the powder, the war speech, the crossing, the jakes. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the middle, where the rides between Chihuahua and the crossing return to desert, water and slaughter without adding a turn, perhaps a tenth of the whole, and the kid’s thread, thin across the long passages from which he is absent.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the westward movement of the American republic rested on a commerce in killing, licensed by states, paid by the piece and indifferent to whose hair was taken. The company is hired to take Apache scalps, kills peaceful Tiguas and then Mexicans because the hair cannot be told apart, and is outlawed by the governments that hired it. The historical record makes the disclosure true. Over it the judge sets a metaphysics of knowledge as dominion, and the epigraph’s scalped skull, three hundred thousand years old, says the condition is older than any nation. Held off the top on two counts: the metaphysics is spoken by a character the book neither endorses nor answers, so the disclosure risks becoming a mood; and the Mexican and Indian peoples are seen only from outside, as quarry or as killers.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The dreadful sublime, at height and at frequency. The Comanche come out of the dust in their plundered finery, “a legion of horribles”, and the sentence that carries them runs on until White’s company is destroyed. Then the judge alone on his rock in the desert; the powder made from a mountain’s guano; a lone tree burning at night with the desert’s creatures gathered to its light; a dead woman kneeling in a niche of rock; a dancing bear shot in a saloon; the judge dancing naked at the close, “like an enormous infant”; fire struck from the rock in the epilogue. Held a step below the summit because the frequency carries its own cost: the elevated register is so constant that in the middle stretches it ceases to elevate, and the reader rides through sublimity as the company rides through country.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Myth built, and the judge bears it. A giant, hairless and pale, he appears where he cannot be, does not age between 1850 and 1878, never sleeps, and says he will never die. He reads as archon, devil, war-god and the demiurge of a gnostic world, and the book supports each reading without settling on one; the epigraph from Boehme makes the gnostic frame the book’s own. Against him the kid, unnamed and born under falling stars, is a fallen Adam with one unexplained reserve. The subtitle builds a second myth: the evening redness is the West as the land of sunset, and a civilisation’s westering as its decline. The particular stays particular: the company is historical, and the guns and saddles are exact. Held below the summit because the kid, the other pole, is too thinly built to bear his half.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The inheritance is plain and the book carries it openly: the King James Bible, Melville, Faulkner, Dante, the nineteenth-century travel narrative whose chapter headnotes it borrows, and the Western, the most worn of American genres. The turn is in what it does to the last of these. It takes the genre of the frontier as moral education and removes the hero, the law, the town, the woman and the redemption, and gives the Western the diction of scripture and the structure of a descent into hell. It turned McCarthy’s work from Appalachia to the Southwest, and dropped the interiority his earlier books allowed. The stake was real: a book written against every commercial expectation of a Western, which sold poorly and lay neglected for a decade. Held below the top because the style fuses masters it names, and the swerve is in the matter more than in the instrument.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The narrator gives no interior: the kid’s thoughts are never told, and the company is seen only as it acts. Landscape and killing receive the same weight and the same diction, and the book names its own law in the desert’s “optical democracy”, where no one thing, man or stone, has precedence. Give the kid a consciousness, or the narrator a judgment, and the knowledge goes: that a killing weighs no more than the weather. The chapter headnotes make the novel a ledger set against the judge’s: he records in order to erase, and the book records what he erased. Held off the top because the picaresque frame is episodic, the twenty-eight years before the last chapter pass in a few pages, and what brings the kid to the jakes is carried by little more than his abstentions.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, and the evidence is forty years of return, real and short: Vereen Bell’s The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy (1988); the essays gathered by Edwin Arnold and Dianne Luce as Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, Leo Daugherty’s gnostic reading among them; John Sepich’s Notes on Blood Meridian (1993) on the sources; Harold Bloom’s championing in How to Read and Why (2000); a Cormac McCarthy Society and its journal. The questions the book plants are still argued: what the judge is; what happens in the jakes; whether the kid’s clemency is a moral fact or a failure of nerve; whether the book indicts the judge or is his testament; what the man in the epilogue is building. Each return has found the book stranger, not plainer. Held below the top because four decades of yield is a forecast partly demonstrated, not centuries.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is the American novel, and within it the Western. The force: it turned the novel of the West from a story of settlement and justice into an epic of the violence beneath settlement, in a prose claiming the authority of scripture, and after it the literary Western could not be written in innocence. The case for reach at forty-one years: neglected for a decade, the book rose into the canon of American fiction and has held its place, a delay credited and discounted. The span cannot show whether that reach will widen, and it is bounded now: the book has not redirected the novel at large, and its imprint on later screen Westerns is mostly asserted, not documented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: places among the runners-up in the New York Times Book Review’s 2006 survey of the best American fiction of the previous twenty-five years and on Time’s 2005 list of the hundred best English-language novels since 1923, and a register among the most imitated in American fiction.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The case for survival at forty-one years rests on survival shown, and the evidence runs one way: a book that failed on publication is more read, more taught and more argued now than at any time since, its criticism growing since Vereen Bell’s study of McCarthy in 1988, and it has outlived its author and the Western revival around it. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: the diction is archaic by design, the matter is the 1840s, and nothing depends on the 1980s. The text is whole. Forty-one years cannot show whether the book outlasts the readers who raised it and the turns of taste that only centuries test, and that alone holds the axis at the foot of the twelve.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on McCarthy’s English, with no translation between. The prose is load-bearing. The long sentence, clause on clause joined by “and”, carries the book’s indifference: every event enters on equal terms. Against it stand the short declaratives of the dialogue and the present-tense address of the opening, “See the child.” The diction draws on scripture, on the archaic, and on the exact names of saddlery, firearms, rock and plant, so that the vision rests on a material world precisely kept. The judge’s speeches are an instrument of their own: Latinate, periodic, courteous, monstrous. The Spanish is left untranslated, and the reader stands where the kid stands. Charged: the mannerism the style’s critics name, a rare word set where a plain one would serve and a cadence that repeats itself in the middle of the book, the charge B. R. Myers made best known in “A Reader’s Manifesto” (The Atlantic, 2001).
Score: 9.4 / 10
One law governs the whole: war is god, the sun is indifferent, and all things under it are weighed alike. Take the two most distant elements, the child at the scullery fire in Tennessee and the man striking fire from the rock in the epilogue: the child stokes a fire and the man strikes one, under the same sun. The judge’s impossibilities obey it as the historical company does, because the narrator records both with the same flat exactness and never adjudicates: a giant who does not age stands in the world of the dated contracts of Chihuahua. The chronology holds: born in 1833, the kid is forty-five at Fort Griffin in 1878. Two breaches are charged: the kid’s clemency, a moral fact the law does not account for and the book leaves unexplained; and the epilogue’s turn to enclosure, which stands outside the physics of the rest at some cost to its legibility.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Many orders are held, and the company’s commerce joins them. The natural order: geology, the desert’s plants and creatures, weather, the stars that fall at the kid’s birth. History and the state: the aftermath of the Mexican War, the filibusters, the scalp contracts of Mexican governors, the Quechan crossing, the bone trade and the fencing of the plains. The sacred: the revival, the expriest Tobin, the penitentes, the gnostic frame, the judge’s theology of war. Knowledge: the judge’s natural history, law and archaeology, and the prehistoric skull of the epigraph. What is not held is deliberate and still counts. The family is a dead mother and a drunken father; love and women are nearly absent; consciousness is withheld by design. The book encompasses the world from outside and the human order thinly, and the axis weighs what is achieved, not what is intended.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime, The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 9.4. The dreadful sublime reached often and at height, from the Comanche out of the dust to the judge’s naked dance; a myth built on a judge who never sleeps and says he will never die, set against a kid born under falling stars; and a prose whose long sentence weighs every event alike, from the opening address to the untranslated Spanish.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Imperishable at 8.6. The first is held by the middle of the book, where the rides between Chihuahua and the crossing return to desert, water and slaughter without adding a turn, perhaps a tenth of the whole, and by the kid’s thread, thin across long passages; the second by its span, forty-one years of survival shown against the centuries behind the summit. Next above them, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7: a reorganisation of the Western whose reach was delayed and has not redirected the novel at large.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.2, The Living Form at 9.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 9.1, The Swerve at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, Pressure on Tradition by two tenths and The Imperishable by one. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.8. Every summit condition is met. At forty-one years it stands in the tier on a case for reach and survival made under fifty years.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, published by Random House, New York, in 1985: his fifth novel, after The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973) and Suttree (1979), and the first he set in the Southwest. It is scored as one novel in twenty-three chapters and an epilogue, with its three epigraphs and its chapter headnotes, which are part of the work. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on McCarthy’s English, with no translation between; the untranslated Spanish is part of that English and is judged with it. Events are paraphrased. English is quoted only where its words are certain, and the epigraphs are paraphrased, save the last three words of Valéry’s. The historical company is John Joel Glanton’s, contracted to Mexican state governments in 1849 and 1850 and destroyed by the Quechan at the Colorado crossing in April 1850. The principal source is Samuel Chamberlain’s memoir My Confession, first published in 1956, and John Sepich’s Notes on Blood Meridian (1993; revised 2008) traced the sources in detail; neither is part of the work. The prose read sentence by sentence in order, and counts of its words, sentences, dialogue and Spanish, are beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the page and word counts, the sales of the first edition and the history of the book’s writing, are not given. Citations are by episode, with chapters named only for the first and the last.