Notes on the Valery epigraph

Blood Meridian begins with three epigraphs. Each introduces what will develop into a major theme for the novel. The first is by Paul Valéry:

Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

Valéry's best known (if at all) to modern readers as a poet, probably the last gasp of that Baudelaire-styled dark Romantic/Gothic writing that's popular with moody tweens. However, the above quote comes from his 1895 essay "The Yalu" on the subject of the First Sino-Japanese War, with Japan fighting China for control of the Korean Pennisula, and is supposedly written from the point of view of the Chinese.

The back story is that for years Japan had been sending their young people abroad to learn the ways and technology of the Western world. To the Chinese, the "modern" influenced Japan represented the Western encroachment on Eastern ideas, and the above quote singles out the Western world's worship of "intelligence," as it is termed in the essay, from which we can infer worship of technology, science, or a general primacy of the individual over nature or culture.

This outlook is important to Blood Meridian and its place as both a Western (bang bang!) novel and a Western (toga wearin') novel. For one, the novel is set during the introduction of the repeating rifle. Largely credited for putting the "wild" into wild West, the repeating rifle illustrates the slaughter that can result when high technology is paired with savage conditions. As an indictment of Western (toga et al.) thought, the epigraph calls into question the Enlightenment belief that men can reason or invent their way out of problems. To the Chinese, the priorities of the West appear baffling and compulsive, unfettered from nature or history.

One other point: the "Yalu" of the essay's title is the river along the China-Korea border and the site of a pretty futile battle. The Japanese, greatly outnumbered but possessing superior technology and modern warfare training, needed to stave off Chinese landing parties from crossing the Yalu. They failed. The Chinese, just by sheer force of numbers, were able to cross the Yalu but paid such a price for it (thanks to the Japanese's Western tech) that it was largely viewed by outsiders as a Japanese victory. As seen in an editoral cartoon from the time:

Curiously, even though the Chinese successfully made it into Korea, to their way of thinking, the casulties and damage they incurred from crossing the Yalu caused them to view it as a defeat as well. Even the Chinese leader who made it into Korea was called back and stripped of command. In the end, the Battle of Yalu accomplished nothing, resulting in neither side bettering their position and only served to prolong the war.

Violence for its own sake, stripped of any larger goal for the state or the hero, appears frequently in Blood Meridian.