Episode IX: A Cannibal of a Craft

Moby-Dick's Influence on Blood Meridian

1. The Black and Seamless Sea

In a 2007 interview with Rolling Stone, Cormac McCarthy told nonfiction writer David Kushner that while “he reserves high praise for a few contemporary narratives (“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a classic of our time”), his list of great novels stops at four: Ulysses, The Brothers Karamazov, The Sound and the Fury and his favorite, Moby-Dick.”

Melville’s influence on McCarthy’s oeuvre is evident to any reader well-versed in both writers, but nowhere is this influence more apparent than in Blood Meridian—a novel that takes many of its narrative and thematic cues—as well as its antique syntax and diction—from Moby-Dick.

I want to examine the echoes of Melville’s masterpiece in McCarthy’s, but I’ll start by saying that many critics engage in a kind of willful overriding when they begin pointing out the parallels between these two novels. There is never a one-to-correlation between Moby-Dick’s characters, plot, and themes and those of Blood Meridian. Though both pursue their quarry with monomaniacal fervor, Captain Glanton is not merely Captain Ahab in buckskin and boots; there are similarities between the Kid and Ishmael, but we could never imagine the illiterate Kid telling the story of his misadventures with the Glanton Gang, much less writing it.

I’m not interested in cataloging the many allusions to Moby-Dick in Blood Meridian: they are legion. Instead, I’d like to discuss the different ways McCarthy uses these allusions, and how recognizing Moby-Dick’s presence in Blood Meridian enhances our experience of the latter novel.

Three types of this literary figure of speech (as identified by Classicist R.F. Thomas) will be important here: the Single Reference, the Apparent Reference, and the Corrective Allusion.

2. Elijah is Coming: Single Reference

The first significant allusion¹ to Melville’s novel in Blood Meridian comes in Chapter III after the Kid has signed up with Captain White’s filibusters. He rides into Laredo with a few of his new comrades and ends up at a tavern where he and the other would-be warriors are confronted by a prophet:

“There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down and order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters.

They’ll stop you at the river, he says.

The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talkin to me?

At the river. Be told. They’ll jail you to a man.

Who will?

The United States Army. General Worth.

The hell they will.

Pray that they will.

[The second corporal] looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old man?

Do ye cross that river with yon filibuster [Captain White] armed ye’ll not cross it back.

Don’t aim to cross it. We goin to Sonora.

What’s it to you, old man?

The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell ain’t half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.” (42-43)

Readers who are also familiar with Moby-Dick will be reminded of Chapter XIX of that novel, when, having just signed on with the Pequod and it’s mad captain, Ishmael and Queequeg are accosted by a man on the docks “shabbily appareled in faded jacket and patched trousers.” (132)

The prophet (as he’s called in the chapter’s title) wants to know if the two men “mean to ship in the Pequod,” and when Ishmael notifies him that they “have just signed the articles [contract]”, the shabby stranger asks, “Anything [on the contract] about your souls?”

“About what?” says Ishmael.

“Oh, perhaps you haven’t got any,” the prophet says, then begins to tell Ishmael and Queequeg about Captain Ahab’s tragic history, how the captain lost one leg to a whale on a previous voyage and nearly died.

Ishmael and Queequeg are about as eager to listen to this “cracked” old prophet (his name is, of course, “Elijah”) as the Kid and his companions are to the Mennonite in Laredo, and beat a hasty retreat.

But following morning, when Ishmael and Queequeg are about to board the Pequod for their great (and Queequeg’s final) adventure, Elijah accosts them once again, leaving them with prophetic words indeed: “Good-bye to ye. Shan’t see ye again soon, I guess; unless it’s before the Grand Jury.” (143)

Even first-time readers of Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian likely sense what Ishmael and the Kid choose to ignore: both their expeditions are cursed. Only Ishmael will escape the waves that swallow Captain Ahab, the Pequod, and its crew; only the Kid and a mercenary named Sproule will escape the Comanche war party who devours Captain White’s filibusters.

The figure of the Prophet/Mennonite serves as a Threshold Guardian, that figure Joseph Campbell identifies in so many Heroes’ Journeys. It’s not only important to McCarthy to install such an archetypal figure: he wants an archetype that brings the Elijah of Melville’s novel to mind. If the Reader is familiar with Moby-Dick, s/he’ll experience a kind of doubleness when s/he encounters the Mennonite in that Laredo saloon: s/he will both be involved in the Kid’s journey past the threshold and into heightened levels of violence/danger and will be reminded of Ishmael when he stepped through a similar door.

This literary repurposing creates the effect of “reading” two books simultaneously (Melville makes similar use of the Biblical tale of Jonah in his novel). R.F. Thomas refers to this use of allusion as Single Reference: here, an author intends his reader to "recall the context of the model and apply that context to the new situation."

3. The Chased Bones of its Enemies: Apparent Reference

In Chapter XVI of Moby-Dick, Ishmael describes the Pequod as being:

“appareled like any […] barbaric emperor, [...] neck heavy with pendants of polished ivory. She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies. All round, her unpanelled, open bulwarks were garnished like one continuous jaw, with the long sharp teeth of the sperm whale, inserted there for pins, to fasten her old hempen thews and tendons to.” (101-102)

When Glanton’s Gang first enters Blood Meridian in Chapter VI, the Kid is being detained by Mexican authorities in Chihuahua City. He and the other American prisoners are placed on a work detail where:

“they saw one day a pack of viciouslooking humans mounted on unshod Indian ponies riding half-drunk through the streets, bearded, barbarous, clad in the skins of animals stitched up with thews and armed with weapons of every description, revolvers of enormous weight and bowieknives the size of claymores and short twobarreled rifles with bores you could stick your thumbs in and the trappings of their horses fashioned out of human skin and their bridles woven up from human hair and decorated with human teeth and the riders wearing scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears and the horses rawlooking and wild in the eye and their teeth bared like feral dogs and riding also in the company a number of halfnaked savages reeling in the saddle, dangerous, filthy, brutal, the whole like a visitation from some heathen land where they and others like them fed on human flesh.” (83, emphasis mine)

Like the “cannibal craft” on which Ahab wages his war, Glanton’s Gang has been “tricked forth” in “the chased bones” of its enemies, the Apache, and McCarthy has clearly written this description of the scalp hunters with the above-quoted passage from Moby-Dick in mind.

In his study of literary figures of speech, R.F. Thomas writes of the Apparent Reference, a type of allusion “which seems clearly to recall a specific model but which on closer inspection frustrates that intention.”

While the whalers aboard the Pequod have tricked out their craft with bones of whales, Glanton his men have adorned their horses and even their own bodies with the actual body parts of the Native peoples they hunt.

The cannibalism of the Pequod is metaphoric; McCarthy’s is (almost) literal—cannibalism, of course, can mean not only the consumption of human beings by other humans, but the removal and repurposing of (body) parts as well.

Captain Ahab and his men have turned the Pequod into a representation of a whale: it wears the bones of its enemy in the same way that a hunter dons camouflage. Captain Glanton and his men have a good deal farther by garnishing themselves with human ears, hair, and skin, creating a perverse simulacrum of the so-called “savages” they hunt.

For cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, a simulacrum is “never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

If there is such a thing as “savages” in Blood Meridian, it is Glanton and his gang. McCarthy mimes Melville’s use of the word barbaric and has his narrator call the scalp hunters barbarous: uncivilized, crude, savagely cruel.

McCarthy’s Apparent Reference to the Pequod recalls the model of Ahab’s ship, but frustrates as we inspect it more closely.

4. The Monumental White Shroud: Corrective Reference

Nautical and oceanic imagery abounds in Blood Meridian—somewhat strange given that the entire narrative takes place on dry (and often desert) land. From the moment in the first chapter where Reverend Green’s tent collapses "like a huge and wounded medusa” (8) to the lamps at Fort Griffin in the final chapter that are likened to “the false shore of a hospice” (337), readers are referred to marine life—and that masterwork of the marine world to which Cormac McCarthy has continually returned.

Of course, the White Whale in the room is that massive albino, Judge Holden. In Chapter VII, the narrator will describe Judge Holden as having a “pleated brow not unlike a dolphin’s” (97), and constantly make references to the Judge that conjure Moby Dick in the informed Reader’s mind.

Though white and large, Judge Holden is not, strictly speaking, Moby Dick—not in a way where readers can draw and one-to-one correlation, of course. McCarthy never wishes us to see the murderous and seemingly un-killable Judge as an innocent beast pursued by blind and unreasoning hatred.

Moby Dick’s many evocations in Blood Meridian serve as what R.F. Thomas calls a Corrective Allusion, “where the imitation is clearly in opposition to the original source's intentions.”

In McCarthy’s novel, the “unreckonble” being is not a whale, but a man.

Consider, for a moment, the close of Moby-Dick’s famous forty-second chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Ishmael has told us this whiteness was what “above all things appalled” (272) him, and he goes on to tell us why:

“Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge-pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?” (282-83)

While Judge Holden is most certainly not Moby Dick—not in the strict sense—perhaps it would be even more accurate to he is the whale’s whiteness: the absence, the blankness, the “mystery himself,” as the ex-Priest Tobin says.

McCarthy makes a Corrective Allusion by uncoupling the whale from his “visible absence of color,” attaching that “heartless void” and all its mysterious, metaphysical weight to the “vast abhorrence of the Judge.”

A final note:

There is one direct mention of whales in Blood Meridian, coming at the end of the Kid’s journey west, when he escapes, for a season, the sentence of the Judge.

Our teenage protagonist reaches the beach outside San Diego and stands on the shores of the Pacific Ocean—somewhere, across those leagues of water, the Pequod and its crew met their fate. Here, at the edge of his known world, the Kid is granted a strangely tranquil moment in this novel of fire and blood, staring, “out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.” (316)

1. Strictly speaking, the first allusion to Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale is two-part title of McCarthy’s book—Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West.