Refocusing Western Revisionism: McCarthy’s Debt to Butcher’s Crossing

abstract:Many critics make a link between John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing and Blood Meridian, claiming a shared bloodiness and broad existential concerns. This article uncovers more direct links. Williams intended Butcher’s Crossing (1960) as a bleakly existential riposte to Emerson’s encouragement to “go west” in search of God in the form of a “transparent eyeball.” The novel asks what happens when the universalizing eye gazes upon the brutal rather than the godly. The same corrupted vision lies at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a novel that, as Neil Campbell notes, “peer[s] into the abyss of Western American History and bears fictional witness to its terrifying and spectacular events.” In the narrative worlds of both works the role of witness is debased; there is no moral focus and no heroic central character to be deconstructed, just a passive teenager whose gaze “sees all” without feeling, the authors deliberately withholding censure. There is at their center a group of hunters led by a demonic “Ahab-like leader” whose blinkered and bloody pursuit of the elusive prey (whether skins or scalps) is transformed into an exploration of the soul. Though visual metaphors dominate, the characters remain blind, leading to a discussion as to whether they evolve morally at all.