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If we used a different vocabulary or if we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.
-Misattributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Crafts, Schneirla, and Robinson 396)
Few novels question so persistently the relation between words and phenomena, interpretive style and physical presence, as Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: or, the Evening Redness in the West (1985). Start with the fact that much of this grotesque account is verifiable, as close to history as novels generally get, drawn in sometimes verbatim tones from memoirs, chronicles, eyewitness testimony, all ably documented by John Sepich. Then acknowledge how little it is driven by plot, accompanying two central characters (the kid, Judge Holden) but otherwise offered as mere peregrinations stitched together by the phrase "they rode on"-as if "plot" were less pressing for McCarthy than isolated events and the language describing them. Finally, consider quicksilver vacillations in that language itself, swerving between rudimentary realist prose and an otherwise ostentatious voice that revels in strange arabesques. The novel everywhere seems self-conscious about its stylistic bona fides, especially at indelible moments when symbolic constructs might seem irrelevant alongside the grim history they represent.
It comes as little surprise, then, that critics so often focus on the schism between the novel's gruesome subject matter and its often visionary style-a style that tests assumptions by leveling the human to the minimally animate, and animate life to no greater moment than inert rocks and insensate shrubs. Readings of Blood Meridian regularly celebrate this apparent challenge to anthropomorphism, which seems most vivid in its scenes of ghastly violence. Yet however singular McCarthy's vision, it emerges from a distinguished tradition in which physical violence is transmuted by rhetorical style-indeed, in which depictions seem as violent in their formal solicitations as in the physical realm they invoke. McCarthy may exceed his predecessors in the abandon with which characters destroy one another, but he no less than they creates a verbal realm in which the humanizing discriminations quashed by his characters are restored by his narrative-a narrative whose violent rhythmic displacements confirm paradoxically the prospect of seeing anew, the very basis for ethical and aesthetic discernment. The disruptions of his prose, alternately lavish and tight-lipped, induce in readers capacities for judgment and valuation (tinged by astonishment...