We’ve been looking primarily at how the Quest and Trickster structures play out in the opening chapter of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. You’ll find the post which explains the structures here.
Very often we’ll find a structure loops – usually but not always in a triple ‘try, try, try again’ pattern. There are many instances of this in the opening chapter – in the fight scene, for instance. At the beginning of chapter 2 of Blood Meridian, more looping Quest structures unfold.
His ‘days of begging’ are presumably unsuccessful as they led to ‘days of theft’. When he ‘keeps from off the king's road for fear of citizenry,’ a new Quest loop starts - will he be successful? We read on. When he feels the sun’s heat is burning him, he makes a hat out of leaves – yet another mini Quest structure.
There are a couple of elements I found puzzling when reading through this chapter - if dawn ‘finds him’ in the ‘draw’, why then does the mule watch for light? And if this is set in 1849/50, then jeans of the kind I assume McCarthy has the hermit wearing wouldn’t have been invented.
That aside, what’s happening in the scene with the hermit?
Their conversation is a testing ground. When the old man says, ‘ye was lost to of come here,’ then asks, ‘Was they a sandstorm? Did ye drift off the road in the night? Did thieves beset ye?’ What does he want to find out? That his assumptions / instincts are correct? When the kid verifies them (falsely, as we know, as readers) and the old man is satisfied, two Trickster structures start to play out - but what if he works out that the kid’s being economical with the truth? His story line then follows a Quest structure. Either way, it leads to the ‘heart’ of the scene.
When he talks of the four things that can destroy the earth, the earth becomes linked to him. When the object he shows the boy is handed through the flames, fire is drawn into the scene. Water featured at the opening of their meeting. What about air?
McCarthy’s writing is full of symbolism and biblical or spiritual allusions. The man is called both an ‘anchorite’ and a ‘hermit’. He speaks in oracular terms. When the kid asks him whether he reckons it’ll rain, he answers equivocally: ‘It's got ever opportunity. Likely it won’t.’
It doesn’t.
The kid arrives at Bexar – again, the four elements appear – the sandy road, the white corpses on the deadcart which he passes on his way there described as ‘spirit folk’, the water in the well, and the welcoming or threatening glow of light in the tavern.
What’s interesting about McCarthy’s style of writing apart from his use of symbolism is the rhythm of his writing – which shows in his relaxed or tight use of story structures. Here’s one example:
There was a team of dancers in the street and they wore gaudy costumes and called out in Spanish. He and the mule stood at the edge of the lights and watched. Old men sat along the tavern wall and children played in the dust. They wore strange costumes all, the men in dark flatcrowned hats, white nightshirts, trousers that buttoned up the outside leg and the girls with garish painted faces and tortoiseshell combs in their blueblack hair. The kid crossed the street with the mule and tied it and entered the cafe. A number of men were standing at the bar and they quit talking when he entered. He crossed the polished clay floor past a sleeping dog that opened one eye and looked at him and he stood at the bar and placed both hands on the tiles.
The barman nodded to him. Digame, he said.
The first three sentences set up the scene – the action just flows forwards. Time passes. The costumes are first described as ‘gaudy’, then ‘strange’ – and with the second iteration, the rhythm, at the level of story structure, quickens.
They dress for effect. The men wear trousers that button up the outside leg. There are several Quest structures implied just in that sentence. The decoration is ostentatious – decadent in its superfluity, and yet it provides visual detail that draws the eye. In a world lit only by fire, the contours of the fastenings typical of Mariachi musicians would catch the light. The sequence of events that led to the development and uptake of the designs of the various items of clothing and accessories described here, and the adoption and acceptance of them by society are condensed into one sentence. Whether this is another anachronism is a moot point. The trousers, for instance, have their precursors in the dress costume associated with the Charrería, and have a political aspect to them which unfolds via a Trickster structure. Prior to 1860, they were linked to gangs of bandits. In another Trickster structure, they became associated with police forces that the bandits ended up joining out of political reasons. They were taken up by musicians around the time of the Mexican revolution ca. 1910–1920. The musicians in this scene in Blood Meridian could simply have been locals in their best gear gathering for a celebration.
The kid seems to have undergone a change – he’s cheated, he’s stolen, but now he offers to work in exchange for a drink. Is the fact that he ends up cheated the balancing act we’ve been waiting for? Does it somehow avenge the wrongs that may have been done to the tavernkeeper’s wife and the family that stabled his mule? Does it matter that neither one of the potentially cheated characters has the satisfaction of knowing what happened at that point? That’s up to you to decide.
If you enjoy story, find out more about The Unknown Storyteller project. It maps 18 distinct story structures (excluding comedy and tragedy) identified so far using only 6 simple basic visually intuitive symbols that will enable you to find out more about how story ‘stories’ on my website at leonconrad.com — not to mention some very cool writing exercises that will help you tell the stories you want to tell more effectively.