Blood Multiverse; Or, The Evening Redness in the Abyss

I have written before about the failings of the Planescape authors to do anything really compelling with the ideas which they had either inherited (the D&D planes) or come up with themselves (the factions). To openly and unabashedly mix my metaphors, they had lightning in a bottle and failed to make the sum into more than its parts.

My argument, roughly a year ago, was that although Planescape implies a what I called a 'continual life-or-death struggle over the substance of reality', what it comes up with is really just a self-consciously 'edgy' fancy dress party and some imaginative locations which in practice, as I elsewhere put it, are 'barren and inert'. It is almost all style and almost no substance, elevated for the most part by the sheer fluke of happening to have a genuinely great fantasy illustrator, Tony Diterlizzi, doing most of the art. It is the D&D RPG setting equivalent of The Monkees, with Diterlizzi cast in the role of Mike Nesmith. (That's a reference for all the younger fans out there reading.) 

Some further light is shed on these matters by an interesting article on Cormac McCarthy's fiction which reveals - I did not know this - that Blood Meridian was partially inspired by two fragments by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, one of which reads:

War is the father of us all and our king. War discloses who is godlike and who is but a man, who is a slave and who is a freeman.

This, the author of the article links to a particular speech given by the Judge, the principal antagonist in McCarthy's great masterpiece:   

[W]ar is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

War here is thus cast by McCarthy as being an act of creation in the sense that genuine struggle, with an all-or-nothing victor, grants to that victor the capacity not merely to occupy territory or take booty but to remake the conditions of thought itself: to take all pre-existing norms and values and both reforge and then force them on the loser. War can thus be a metaphysical act, with metaphysical implications - it takes two ways of being, two potential futures, and sets them against one another so as to grant one the victory. 

The alternative title to Blood Meridian is The Evening Redness in the West, and it is not difficult to trace one's way from these musings on Heraclitus to the semiotic significance of red on the Western horizon: the war which Europeans brought to the New World is an absolutely quintessential illustration of the point - it did not 'merely' represent the occupation of land but the brutal casting together of different modes of being, one of which ultimately triumphed and imposed its metaphysics on the other totally. The way in which the Aztecs, Incas, Beothuk, Sioux etc. existed in the world was extinguished forever in that grand conflict, even though the people remained: redness on the Western horizon indeed, and not merely in the form of blood but extinction. (There is nothing unique about this story, of course, in the sordid narrative of human history - it is simply a very striking example.) 

To come back to Planescape, the idea that the planes of existence would be the battleground of metaphysical conflict - 'War' in the McCarthyian sense, rather than the quotidian 'war' of battles over land and loot - is right there, implicit in the setting, and ready to spring forth. Planescape, as those familiar with the setting will remember, even has a concept of metaphysical and literal physical change taking place in accordance with victories or losses in conflict, with whole fragments of the landscape shifting from one plane to another in accordance with the results of philosophical and military struggle. And, to put matters even more firmly on the nose, the notion of Blood War, which the authors came up with, is more or less entirely captured by the musings on Heraclitus in the Judge's speech. To return to where we started, then, the setting of Planescape is pregnant with deep, serious, and visceral potential - and it is a great pity that this was never properly realised in such a way as to do justice to the ideas which the setting hints at.