Art from evil

When you have a bad experience with a book, sometimes the best thing to do is to set it aside and wait a while before giving it another chance to prove its worth. In the case of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, my reading experience was poisoned by its context.

The book was required reading in the worst graduate-school class I ever had, a three-hour seminar that met on the fourth floor of a very old building in which the only ladies' rest room was on the first floor--and there were no elevators. The professor was, excuse the technical language, a wuss: he allowed a small group of American Cultural Studies grad students to dominate the discussion and run roughshod over other students' ideas, and he wouldn't even start the class until those three favored disciples arrived, even if they were 20 minutes late. But that kind of behavior was not unusual at a university in which the American Cultural Studies program was nationally renowned while the Literature Ph.D. was being phased out. (I may have been the penultimate recipient of a Literature Ph.D. in that program--unless one of those perennial ABDs finally finished the dissertation.)

The event that really soured me on that course occurred the week before we were scheduled to discuss Blood Meridian. Now on the first day of class, Professor Wuss had explained why he had selected each book on the reading list and described it in glowing terms, but as we approached Blood Meridian, it was clear that something was awry. The professor looked distressed. "I'm sorry I assigned Blood Meridian," he said. "One of my colleagues pressured me to include it on the reading list. I just started reading it and I find the violence disturbing. Frankly, I couldn't get past page 57."

The next week when he asked the class what they thought of the book, you wouldn't believe what they said: "Disturbing." "Appalling." "Couldn't get past page 57."

(Page 57, for those familiar with the novel, is where our hero stumbles upon the dead-baby bush. It's a pretty clear indication that the reader will be spending the next 300 pages in Hell.)

Now I'm just contrary enough to have been annoyed by the professor's attempt to dictate students' responses to the book, so I had read the whole thing--and from casual conversations before class, I knew a few others had read it too. But when the professor asked how many people had finished the book, my hand was the only one that went up.

The favored disciples shook their heads as if I'd just admitted to eating small children for breakfast, and the professor demanded that I defend the book. "You assigned it--you defend it" was what I wanted to say, but that would not have been wise. (Given his specialization, that professor could easily have ended up on my dissertation committee, and I can thank my lucky stars that he did not). The class was three hours long. I did my best.

For years I've wondered whether Blood Meridian was really worth all that fuss, because it would be ridiculous to be publicly crucified over a book that isn't really very good. So finally this year I decided to read it again, and the verdict is mixed.

Let's admit right at the start that the violence is disturbing, but on the other hand, the worst violence is described with the same sort of affectless prose we encounter in some of those Old Testament passages dealing with dashing babies' heads against the rocks or chopping a concubine into 12 chunks for easy mail delivery. More disturbing is the fact that some of the violence inspires really beautiful prose, such as the vivid passage in which a man's death by burning is described in words that flame right off the page.

Is it acceptable to make art out of evil? That would have made a great discussion question in that long-ago grad-school class, but it would have been difficult to discuss without some reference to the book that no one had read. It's a question that comes up in reference to Holocaust literature and, more recently, literature about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The same question could be asked about, for instance, Dante's Inferno, but the Inferno is not the end of the story: Hell might be full of wretched people gnawing on each others' necks, but Paradise is always ahead.

McCarthy, on the other hand, offers Hell without the promise of Paradise. If McCarthy's purpose was to immerse readers in the problem of pain and rub their noses in the type of evil that like a roaring lion searches to and fro seeking whom it may devour, then the book is a success, but it's not for the faint of heart. I wouldn't recommend it to Professor Wuss or his ilk. It takes a strong stomach to walk through Hell, and some are just not up to the journey.