Cormac McCarthy’s bloodiest book is also his most beloved. Why?

In trying to explain the popularity of novelist Theodore Dreiser, the literary critic Lionel Trilling proposed that it had something to do with Americans’ sense of reality. Trilling concluded that, for Americans, the grittier the artistic vision, the more bracing and stripped of sentiment, the closer it must be to reality.

Dreiser’s novels appealed to his readers’ conviction that facts are really brute facts, and truth is always the cold hard truth.

Trilling’s insight goes some way toward explaining the success of another American literary giant, Cormac McCarthy, who died last month. Since McCarthy’s passing an outpouring of appreciative retrospectives have lionized the author, who wrote his way into the conversation for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

His success extended beyond highbrow literary circles: several of his books were made into major Hollywood films (“All the Pretty Horses”; “No Country for Old Men”); “The Road” was selected for Oprah’s Book Club. But, when I read what many consider to be McCarthy’s finest novel, “Blood Meridian” (1985), I wondered, as Trilling once did about Dreiser, what exactly this author was appealing to in his audience.

Let me begin by stating the obvious: “Blood Meridian” is a shocking book, as blood-soaked as its title promises and then some. The novel follows a motley troupe of mercenary scalpers through what is now the American Southwest and Mexican Northwest but was, in 1850 when the novel is set, a territory contested by its Indigenous inhabitants, Spanish colonizers and American mercenaries. Death abounds, but not just any death: dead babies hang by their jaws from trees, puppies are tossed into a river and then shot to death, all manner of innocents are slain and their bodies are usually treated gruesomely. This is “death hilarious,” to borrow one of McCarthy’s unfortunate phrases, and its logic is relentless. “Blood Meridian” abides by its own version of the “Chekhov’s gun” principle — call it “McCarthy’s pups” — whereby anything sweet the author introduces is destined to be bludgeoned a few pages later.

Why, then, has this novel received so much praise and why do so many people seem to read it for pleasure?

Partly it’s McCarthy’s arrestingly odd prose. With unflagging precision and imagination, he documents the majesty of the desert landscape through which his protagonists ride, chapter after chapter, in search of victims. The desert mountains are especially richly draped in a seemingly endless wardrobe of literary vestments: there are “crumpled, butcherpaper mountains” and “adamantine ranges rising out of nothing like the backs of seabeasts in a Devonian dawn” and — backlit at night by distant flashes of lightning—“staccato mountains bespoken blue and barren out of the void.”

As it happens, “staccato” also works as a description of the curious pacing of the narrative, wherein McCarthy punctures the serenity of these natural scenes with acts of extraordinary human brutality.

There’s also a compelling philosophical dimension to “Blood Meridian.” McCarthy achieves a real existential charge by presenting characters who subsist in a world that is not only stripped of any evident moral bearings, but also of any civilizing power. It’s as if he defies his readers to salvage from such an unsparing landscape a moral standard against which the horrific acts of his protagonists could be judged.

In an environment so hostile to meaningful human activity, one character in particular experiments with meaning-making. Judge Holden, usually called simply “the judge,” takes advantage of the troupe’s mercenary wanderings to collect wildlife samples, explaining at one point that “only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.” The judge is brilliant and multi-talented and utterly without human feeling. Like the setting, he seems to stand as a challenge to any shallow moralism.

This harsh vision of human life is a powerful part of the book’s appeal: it feeds a haunting suspicion that we live too much among comforting illusions.

We hastily conclude that McCarthy must be right, that he’s pulling back the veil and showing us human nature red in tooth and claw: these are our own hearts, “whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.” “Blood Meridian” appeals to our secret fear that human hearts are full of wilderness and beasts, and we feel grateful to be told this cold hard truth about ourselves.

But the human heart contains many other regions, about which “Blood Meridian” is worryingly silent. The novel’s meagre moral vision leaves readers with the impression that the highest human quality is a kind of ruthless resolve. As readers, we accept McCarthy’s moral vision — not because it captures the breadth of our human experience, but because we fear that it would be naive to insist on the reality of our more admirable qualities, like generosity or thoughtfulness.

In another powerful desert description, McCarthy writes of sheet lightning flashing the mountains into existence at night, “the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.” In its repeated flashes of cruelty, “Blood Meridian” reveals that the novel itself is built on a geology of fear — fear that would have us discount our lived experience of human goodness. We don’t need to deny the dark underbelly the novel depicts so vividly, but we shouldn’t forget that the underbelly is not the whole of the human animal.

Despite the meanness of its characters, the novel itself quietly points in the direction of a fuller account of the human condition. The judge represents a hubristic and destructive drive for knowledge, a drive to catalogue everything so as to commandeer it. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent,” he boasts.

By contrast, McCarthy as author offers another version of the drive to knowledge, a way of knowing that doesn’t seek to control: in his painstakingly affectionate recording of desert phenomena, say, or in the way the novel bears witness to and thereby seeks to understand human savagery without expecting to be able to eradicate it.

The very act of writing “Blood Meridian” attests to the fact that curiosity and concern are also features of the human heart. They are less shocking than the dark corners in which the novel thrives, but they are no less real and, if anything, more important.

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