I read a few pieces recently about American soldiers in Afghanistan killing civilians and cutting off their fingers for trophies. This is obviously disturbing. It is also confounding in a more deeply troubling way--where does the impulse for such perversion and depravity come from? Of course, we all know that war begets atrocity, that the seduction of violence often yields the suspension of restraint necessary to the observance of basic decency and goodwill. We also know that this is not the first time that American soldiers have taken body parts as trophies (see photo below from WWII). The desecration of the body is indeed a common practice throughout the history of warfare. In our daily thoughts, however, we need to believe that the "better angels of our nature" are more enduring. That humanity is capable of love and fellowship and mutuality; that we can strive toward understanding and tolerance; that honoring the basic bodily dignity of our fellow human beings is an in-built trait that has perforce aided in our evolution and survival as a species. That war is but an aberration. But news of acts such as these force us to question anew the verity of these more hopeful intimations.
In processing this story as best I could I couldn't help but compare this kind of depraved brutality to the gruesome violence depicted in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and wonder if its basic themes do not indeed speak some unbearable truth. This book--while pure genius--is probably the hardest book I've ever read (harder than The Road--which I was reluctant to read for a long time, largely because of my experience with Blood Meridian). In an interview with literary critic Harold Bloom he went so far as to say that Blood Meridian is not only the ultimate western, but the ultimate dramatization of violence (in both instances meaning that its insights and the truths plumbed therein are so profound that it cannot be surpassed in its representation of these, that it stands as the final word). Be that as it may in terms of representation, we have been reminded numerous times in our post-9/11 world of the seemingly ineradicable ubiquity of insensate violence, especially among representatives of our country (though we certainly have no monopoly). This is to say nothing of the upwelling of hate that has recently erupted in popular discourse and related actions--sentiments that gestate the kind of psychic distance and differentiation that allows dehumanization to emerge. The long bloody 20th century provides us with plenty examples of the consequences. It appears to this writer that McCarthy's kind of nihilism might be well-placed after all, and not just some idiosyncratic quirk or a novel literary device.
The theme of the book, some say, is regeneration through violence--the way that violence, or more properly the culture of violence, are so deeply embedded in the American experience that it comes to be who we are as a people, our most defining trait; a quintessential characteristic forged most saliently in the march of westward expansion. The frontier was always a bloodbath. As McCarthy writes, "This country was filled with violent children orphaned by war." This is of course the natural territory of the western, an underrated and under-appreciated genre in literary circles. Some larger truths about who we are or might yet be lie entombed there nonetheless. One consequence being that such a historical reality will inevitably give birth to unimaginably abominable creatures like Blood Meridian's main protagonist, Judge Holden, and that the dark lust for violence will always be with us. The continuing popularity of violence in films and gaming testifies to this, even if it is reduced to vicarious experience. We haven't been desensitized to violence so much as continually habituated to it, one generation to the next, so that when soldiers cut the fingers off of civilian victims in Afghanistan it reminds us more of the hyper-realities of on-screen interfaces than serving as cause for self-examination.
Judge Holden (known more often simply as the Judge) is the embodiment of this appallingly grotesque sensibility of violence, or unrestrained violence itself--indeed, violence deified. It is appalling not in its gratuitousness, but in its grounding in the familiar instrumental rationality and philosophical sophistication of Holden. Consider the following passages of the Judge holding forth:
"It makes no difference what men think of war . . . War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."
and
"Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard . . . trial of chance or trial of worth all game aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all . . . This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination."
Divining with the severed fingers of deceased victims is as macabre an image as any imagined by McCarthy. In the concluding chapter of the book, the Judge and one remaining companion, an orphaned young man from Tennessee known as the kid, ride onto the north Texas plains where they encamp with a group of scavengers collecting the bones of slaughtered buffalo. Some among them notice and inquire about the Judge's necklace. It is made from the severed ears of the selfsame Apaches whose scalps he'd traded for bounty in northern Mexico. The final scene paints an image of the Judge dancing with nothing on but a hat among other dancers to fiddle music in a north Texas saloon and brothel. The dance, says the Judge, "is the warrior's right." "He is a great favorite" among the dancers writes McCarthy--"He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die." Maybe the Judge will always be with us.