This article was downloaded by: [University of Rhodes]On: 04 June 2014, At: 13:15Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UKCritique: Studies inContemporary FictionPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vcrt20Everything a Hunterand Everything Hunted:Schopenhauer and CormacMcCarthy's Blood MeridianDwight Eddins aa The University of Alabama , Tuscaloosa, AlabamaPublished online: 26 Mar 2010.To cite this article: Dwight Eddins (2003) Everything a Hunter and EverythingHunted: Schopenhauer and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian , Critique: Studies inContemporary Fiction, 45:1, 25-33, DOI: 10.1080/00111610309595324To link to this article:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111610309595324PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLETaylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,or suitability for any purpose of the Content. 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Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttp://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditionsDownloaded by [University of Rhodes] at 13:15 04 June 2014 Everything a Hunter and Everything Hunted: Schopenhauer and Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian DWIGHTEDDINS he great novelists of modern times have tended to be those whose visions estrange us from our familiarworld to bringus backto it withunique T new perspectivesand an expanded sense of the humandomain. J oyce, Faulkner, Mann, and Pynchon-totake four prominent examples-alldestabi- lize and unsettle to construct an enhanced reality. Their subversion can be either epistemologicalor ontologicalor both;it may problematizethe ways in which we construct reality or else problematize the very modes of being by which we define thatreality. In practice,as BrianMcHale notes,these two problematics tend to blur into each other: [Ilntractable epistemologicaluncertainty becomesat acertain pointonto- logical pluralityor instability: pushepistemologicalquestionsfar enough and they tip over into ontological questions. By the same token, push onto- logical questionsfar enough and they tip over into epistemologicalques- tions-thesequence is notlinear and unidirectional, butbidirectionaland reversible. ( 1 1 )From the beginning, Cormac McCarthy has been a master practitioner of this calculated estrangement. He dramatizes the seemingly inhuman extremes of the human condition amid the seemingly unnatural presentness of natural landscapes even as he questions the very possibilityof reconciling these discrepancies into a coherentpicture.The onto-epistemologicalproblematicofthisdrama becomes most explicit and intense in Blood Meridian, where at times an alien order of being seemsto impinge on quotidianreality.Partlyin responseto that, thescholarly commentary on this novel has tended to be of a wider philosophical and religious FALL 2003, VOL.45, NO.125 Downloaded by [University of Rhodes] at 13:15 04 June 2014 scope than that on McCarthys other novels. Several studies bear directly on this problem.StevenShavironoteshowtheincessantfluiddisplacementofthe novelsproseupsetsourusualdistinctionsbetweensubjectiveandobjective, betweenliteralandfigurative, or betweenempirical description andspeculative reflection(152).BothLeoDaughteryandRickWallachinvokethedualistic ontology and the arcane epistemology of ancient Gnosticism to explain the ubiq- uitous evil of the novels world and the uncertaintyof what Wallach calls the in vivo ontic status, the questionable whatness, of J udge Holden (125,126). But Wallach ends up figuring the judge in Derridean terms as the dance of writings simultaneous creation and effacement of meaning (134). Iwould like to add Arthur Schopenhauers philosophy to this mix, not only because the categories and dynamics of his system provide some illuminating paradigmsbutalso becausehisbasicworldviewhassuchaffinitywiththe novelsprevailingvision. First, however,anapologia for bringing a dualistic metaphysic to bear on a writer more generally regarded as the practitioner of a sternlymonisticrealism.Itisimportanttonoteasastartingpointthat McCarthys onto-epistemological subversions are woven into his fictions with such ingenious subtlety that the narrative retains its base in a prevailingreal- ism. Eschewing both the overt epistemological constructivism of Faulkner and J oyce and theovertontological constructivism ofBarthand Pynchon,these novels answer more or less to the letter if not the spirit of the criteria set forth by J . P. Stern i n On Realism. Realistic fictions, says Stern, are erected on firm ground which revealsno epistemological cracks, and [. . .] when such cracks appear, theyare not explored but transformed into the psychology of charac- ters:realismdoesntask whethertheworldis real.[. . .] what it implicitly denies is that in this world there is more than one reality, and that this denial is in need of proof (31, 54); and, again, Ontology is not his [the realistic nov- elists] business (1 12). The primordial forcefulness of McCarthys vision in Blood Meridian, however, puts unusual strains upon realism as a category. Unchecked by moral or social proprieties, burstingwith apocalyptic violence of every imaginable (and unimag- inable) variety, the books driven narrative strains downward into the rawest phys- icalitiesofliterarynaturalismandupward-Iargue-towardametaphysical limbo beyondphysicallimitations.Tracingthefirstofthesevectors,Barclay Owens devotes a whole chapter of his recent book on McCarthys Western novels to presenting Blond Meridian as the apotheosis of the American naturalistic tradi- tion.Owens emphasizestheunbridledDarwiniancompetitiveness,theanimal savagery, and the grotesquerie ofthe novels protagonists,as well as their apish inarticulateness; and he convincingly places these phenomenain a tradition that stretches from Stephen Crane through J ames Dickey. This vision of a primordial reality demonstrates, for Vereen Bell, the antimetaphysical bias of McCarthys novels up through Blood Meridian, a bias that binds the reader to a purely phe- nomenal world with no first principles, no foundational truth (2, 9). 26CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University of Rhodes] at 13:15 04 June 2014 Bell is certainly correct in denying the presenceofany doctrinaire ideology behind McCarthys narrations. I, however, argue that an antimetaphysical bias is itself a metaphysical position in the more general sense of that word and that the resistance to signification, the sheer opacity of being with which McCarthys elementalrealmpresentsus, effectsan onto-epistemologicaldestabilizingthat hints at the mysterious working of principlesand truths yet undiscovered, per- haps undiscoverable. Bell, in a sense, admits as much when he points out that the novels appear [. . .] to resist abstraction on purpose and to move instead toward some more primal epistemology, toward a knowledge of origins before a bicam- eral brain enabled us-orcompelled us-tobegin to sort things out (2). But to move away from our brains sorting-out process is to move, in Kantian terms, away from the realmofapparitional phenomenain the direction of the noume- nal, of unmediated things-in-themselves;and it is this antinomy, suitably modi- fied, that serves as the basis for Schopenhauers metaphysic. From a different angle, Bell suggests that those passages in which we might sus- pect McCarthy of being more metaphysical, his occasional labored and latinate flights ofprose poetrywith their high ratio of metaphor, function to keep us from subsiding into a merely naturalistic perceptual realm. They keep a dreamlike, almost symbolist, pressure of meaning, or meaningfulness, alive in the text. J . P. Stem glosses this swerve away from the middle distance of realism toward sym- bolism as one inwhich the author allows the meaning to exceedthe concrete details, underscoringtheir intimatory functionat the expense oftheir referential function (121, 122). But if intimations of meaning exceed the physical evidence, pushing us beyond the naturalistic realm, we are experiencing a quasitranscenden- tal pressure that at least calls into question that realms monistic claim to be the only realm and opens the door to some sort of dualistic possibility. All of this, I hope it will be clear, is in the service of presenting Schopenhauers philosophyasanexplicatoryparallelforBloodMeridian,notofpresenting McCarthy as a belated Idealist philosopher. Consider, as a prephilosophical start- ing point, how Schopenhauers meditation on the observable life of animals, for instance, could just as well apply to the observable life of the Glanton gang: [W]e seeonlymomentarygratification, fleetingpleasureconditionedby wants,much and long suffering, constant struggle, helium omniurn, every- thingahunterandeverything hunted,pressure,want,need,andanxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goer on in saeculaseculorum, or until once again the crust of the planet breaks. (World 2: 354) The parallel is significant because both the novel and the philosophy represent this state of thingsas the prevailingnature ofexistence, not as an abominable extreme. Incessant and often gratuitous warfare without quarter, babies spiked on thornbushes, mules and puppies slaughtered on a whim-theindiscriminate and endlessly repetitive carnage seems to belong to the ground of being itself, as for Schopenhauerinfactit does.This groundhecharacterizesas derWille-the FALL 2003, VOL.45, NO.127 Downloaded by [University of Rhodes] at 13:15 04 June 2014 Will. It is a mindless, ceaseless striving of energies, a blind vortex of creation and destruction without goals. Because we are forced to view its phenomena,includ- ingourselves, underthecategoriesofspaceandtime,wecannot havedirect knowledge of it except through our intuitions of its working within us. Although Schopenhauer does not, despite popular misconceptions of his idealism, deny the realityof our experiencedworld, he conceives of that world as an apparitional representationofthe Will-apparitionalin the sense ofbeing a mere appear- ance determined by space and time. We are reminded here of the verdict of Blood Meridians J udge Holden on the world: it is a hat trick in a medicineshow. a fevereddream, a trancebepopulatewithchimeras havingneitheranalogue or precedent (245). In the context Iam seeking to establish here, apparitional describes the phe- nomenon-theperson,thelandscape,theevent-insofarasitrepresentsand points back toward the noumenon, the primal will that is its underlying reality. It is as though the phenomenonis wavering between an illusory concretenessand an actual insubstantiality. Cormac McCarthy introduces just such an ontological ambiguity into BloodMeridian to suggest a mysterious order of being of which thepersonaeareemanations andaquasitranscendentalagendaofsomesort behind the pattern of events. This dynamic permeates the novel. Glanton and his men appear as ordained agents of the actual [. . .]. Spectre horsemen, pale with dust, anonymous in the crenellated heat. Above all else they appeared wholly at venture,primal,provisional,devoidoforder.Likebeingsevokedoutofthe absolute rock andset at no remove from theirownloomings(172). Atnight amidsourcelesssummer lightning, theywatchhalfwildhorsestrottingin those bluish strobes like horses called forth quivering from the abyss and in the day they look out on the secular aloes blooming like phantasmagoriain a fever land (163). But McCarthys virtuoso set piece in this vein is a description of the attacking Apaches who become fodder for awildmetamorphicrhapsodythat captures the protean energies of the will itself in all their cosmic menace: They crossed before the sun and vanishedone by one and reappeared again and theywere blackin thesun and theyrode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and slurred together and separated again and theyaugmented byplanes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in thedawn-broachedskyahellishlikenessoftheirranksridinghugeand invertedand the horses legsincrediblyelongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries ofsoulsbroke through some misweave in theweft ofthingsinto the world below. (109) It is instructive to read this as a drama of the wills materializationand dema- terialization. The coupling of Hindu and Greek mythologyhere-avatarsand 28CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University of Rhodes] at 13:15 04 June 2014 chimeric-remindsus that theformer termcan referto theappearanceofa deity in animal form and suggests that the ground of being, more directly intuit- ed, might appear as a chimera, that monstrous hybrid of predation. More direct- ly yet, the cries of the disembodied souls break through some misweave in the weft of things in an impossible moment of transcendental horror, the revelation oftheunmediatedwill.This notionthathumanviolenceis inextricablefrom, even ordained by, its macrocosmic context is captured bythe link between the path of Glantons marauding riders and the movements of the earth itself. The cloudbanks stood above the mountains, writes McCarthy, like the dark warp ofthe very firmament and the starsprent reaches of the galaxies hung in a vast aura above the riders heads (1 53-54). This violence also has a microcosmic context suggestive of the wills ubiqui- ty and uniformity. Like William Blake, McCarthy can see the world in a grain of sand, but the reflectiondoes not lead the latter to mystic optimism. Passing over a stretch of alabaster sand, the hooves of the riders horses shape it into pulsat- ing whorls [als if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue of sen- tience. As if in the transit of those riders were a thing so profoundly terrible as to register even to the utmost granulation of reality (247). Immediately afterward, the riders pass through terrain characterized by a neuter austerity in which all phenomenawerebequeathedastrangeequalityso thatamanandarock becomeendowedwithunguessedkinships.Boththenotionofaquasicon- sciousness present even at the minerallevel and that of the ontological equality of natures phenomena fit nicely into Schopenhauers concept of a monistic, uni- versal force field responsible for the status and the dynamism of all existence. This inspiriting, which pervades the novels landscapes, becomes epiphanic in the description of the sea at San Diego, the terminus of the evening redness in the west: the sea is teething on a reef as it heaves its black hide, and its combers lope out ofthe night(304). A horse, gifted withwhatwe mightcall a sixth sense, stands staring into the macrocosmic vortex of being out there past mens knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through theblackandseamlesssea. This all-devouring, seamlessforce fieldhas an absoluteness about it, a menacing primacy that aligns it with the noumenal will, as does-inits own way-thedesert the judge describes to the kid: This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimatelyempty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone (330). Although all the grades of the wills objectification-fromforces like gravity and electromagnetism through minerals, plants, animals, and humankind-exist in a unity that Schopenhauer calls reciprocal adaptation and adjustment, they exist as well in an inner antagonism that is also the very essence of the will. This antagonism shows itself, in Schopenhauers words, in the never-ending war of extermination of the individuals of these species, and in the constant struggle of the phenomena of these natural forces with one another [. . . ] . The scene of action and the object of this conflict is matter that they strive to wrest from one FALL 2003, VOL.45, NO.129 Downloaded by [University of Rhodes] at 13:15 04 June 2014 another. as well as space and time, the union of which through the form ofcausal- ity is really matter (World1: 161). The wresting ofspace and time from other phenomena in acts ofconscience- less appropriation is precisely the driving force of the novels violent excesses- the murder of infants, the slicing of scalps from heads, the ripping out of viscera andgenitals,the systematiccrucifixions.Thattheseexcessesintheir multiple permutations andtheirfrequencythreatentocoalesce intosome awfulnorm within the world of the novel is yet another sign that that microcosm is predicat- ed upon a ruthless, unstinting belligerence deep in the essence of things. It is not simply human-on-humanpredation.Everygrade of the wills objectification, says Schopenhauer, fights for the matter, the space, and the time of another. Per- sistentmattermustchangetheform,since,undertheguidance ofcausality, mechanical, physical, chemical, and organic phenomena, each striving to appear, snatchthe matterfrom one another(World I:14647) .Thus itisthatJ udge Holden,the princeofappropriators,wandersthelandscape drowningpuppies, killingbirdsand butterfliesto collectthem,crackingopen the shinbone ofan antelope with an axe to watch the heated marrow drip on the stones. We also find him destroying artifacts of Indian and Spanish culture after he has made notes on them, with the aim of expunging them-alongwith the notes-fromthe mem- ory of man (140). In Schopenhauerian terms, this megalomaniacal drive for sole proprietorship comes from the will being present, whole and undivided, in each ofits phenomena:Therefore,everyone wants everything for himself,wants to possess, oratleastcontrol,everything,andwouldlike todestroywhatever opposes him(332). This drive extends even to-especially to-mentalappro- priation, because the whole of nature outside the knowing subject exists only in his representation. Glanton,too,isdrivenbythisbizarreontologicalimperativedeepinthe Schopenhauerianscheme of things: the part unwilling to acknowledge that it is anything less than the whole, the pawn of fate intent on usurping the role of its manipulator. Like the will, he was complete at every hour. [. . . Alllowing as he did that mens destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the worldwould be to him and be his charter written intheurstoneitselfheclaimedagencyandsaidsoandheddrivethe remorseless sun on to its finalendarkenment as if hedordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them. (243) Individual willfulness here, as so often in the novel, acquires a force and a cos- micdimensionthatmake thenotionofwillas the ground ofbeinganatural corollary. The judge, of course, is the most complex incarnation and symbol of this meta- physicalhubris.He feels compelled to search out, analyze,and file in his own 30CRITIQUE Downloaded by [University of Rhodes] at 13:15 04 June 2014 consciousnessall seeminglyautonomous phenomena, in keepingwith his prin- ciple that [wlhatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent, and that nothing must be permitted to occur [. . .] save by my dispen- sation(198,199). This cosmic pretensionrepresentsa daring artistic riskfor Cormac McCarthy because his character must embody humanlimitations even ashesuggests amysterioustranscendenceofthem. One remembers Thomas HardysFatherTimeinJ udetheObscure-anotherSchopenhauerian spokesman-floatinguneasilybetweenchildhoodandsymbolhood.But McCarthys risk succeeds more clearly, partly because he knows when to apply negative capability and partly because the metaphysicaldynamic underlying the novels world permits-aswe have seen-ofan ontological dialectic. The judge, liketheotherriders,waversbetweenphenomenonandnoumenon,between embodiment and the primal force field that is embodied. But he is, in his cosmic dimension, more clearly identified with the will. In this light, the feverish dream of the kid in San Diego has particularimport: Whatever his [the judges] antecedents he was something other than their sum, nor was theresystem to divide him back into his origins, for he would not go (309-10).The quest for his history ends up, says McCarthy, at the shore of a void without terminus or origin, while science examining the dusty primal mat- ter blowing down out of the millennia will find no trace ofany atavistic egg by whichtoreckonhiscommencing.Thistranscendentalabsence oforiginsis matched by a projected absence of conclusion and of rest from restless motion in between:He neversleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing.He says that he will never die (335). Compare this with Schopenhauer on the will: [t]he will never tires, never grows old [. . . and] is in infancy what it is in old age, eternal- lyoneandthesame(Will 247). Itis[elternalbecoming, endless flux (World I:164). Inits metaphysicaldimension, then,the character ofthe judge suggests the wills transcendentalstatus; but in its human dimension, ironically, it suggests a transcendingof this transcendence.For Schopenhauer, the marvel of the human intellect is thatit candetachitselffrom the wills relentlessimperativesocca- sionally and contemplate disinterestedlywhat he calls the Ideas of phenome- na. Even when these phenomena are particularlythreateningto the human will of the contemplator-say,a typical day at the office in Blood Meridian-hemay, in Schopenhauerswords,forcibly tear himselffrom his will and its relations, and [. . .] quietly contemplate, as pure, will-less subject of knowing, those very objects so terrible to the will. [. . . H]e is then filled with the feeling of the sub- lime (World I: 201). Onlythe judgeamongtheridersactuallyoccupies thisdetachedaesthetic plateauvis-a-visthe unremittingviolenceof their existence;the others remain subjecttowhatSchopenhauer callstheprincipleofsufficientreason-an immediate concern with the where, the when, the why, and the whither of phe- nomena as they relate to ones own will (World I:178). The judge, on the other FALL 2003, VOL.45, NO.131 Downloaded by [University of Rhodes] at 13:15 04 June 2014 hand, construes the perpetual warfare of existence alternately as an exhilarating game-Menare born for games. [ . . . all1 games aspire to the condition of war (249)-andas a dance enjoyedonlybythosewho havedeliveredthemselves entire to the blood of war (331). To be fair, this is the point at which Schopen- hauerian resignation to bellurn ornniurn shades over into Nietzschean celebration in the spirit of Zarathustra: You should love peace as a means to new war-and the short peace more than the long.[. . .] Yousay it is the good cause that hal- lows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause (47). But it is also worth remembering that Nietzsche acknowledged Schopenhauer as the seminal influence in his own philosophicaldevelopmentand thatSchopen- hauersWille is the clear precursor of the younger philosophers Wille zur Mucht. Finally, I suggest that Schopenhauers explanation of the dynamics involved in the experience of the sublime helps us understand the problematicalaesthetic of BloodMeridian.Manysophisticatedreaders surelyalternate,atleast thefirst time through,betweenawe at thesumptuous proseand the hauntingvignettes and visceral revulsionat the heinousatrocitiesunremittinglydepicted in them. Peter J osyphdescribesthis bifurcatedreactionon hisown part, as wellas the reactionofa friend who judged thatMcCarthywas a literary genius and also probablysomewhat insane(176). The problemis that the sublime detachment createdbyforciblytearingawayfromthewillspressureswiththefearand loathingtheyinduce issporadicallyreciprocatedbythe reattachmentofthose pressuresas thethreatgrowstoo formidable and immediate to transcend.To adoptthe terms usedbyJ oycesStephen Dedalus,thestatic experience ofart gives way to the kinetic experience of actualities, even if the latter are imaginary in origin.In its way, this reactionrepresentsaninvertedtribute to McCarthys power to overwhelmour imaginations, just as the will itself does. It is amusing to speculate that McCarthyis the will in some literary modality. It then follows thatEl Paso is the epicenter ofimaginative creation,the matrixfor a world of infinitely diverting-andthreatening-representations. 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