Blood Meridian Research Articles

Религиозные мотивы в романе Кормака Маккарти «Кровавый меридиан»

This study aims to identify the specific ways in which religious motifs function within the narrative structure and imagery of Cormac McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian”. The article examines these religious motifs and their associated images within the context of the Southern Gothic literary tradition, considering both cultural-historical and philosophical dimensions. The research’s novelty lies in its selection of a subject largely unexplored in domestic literary criticism, as well as in the application of an analytical perspective previously unused for examining this novel. This approach has enabled the identification of the synthetic nature of McCarthy’s religious imagery, which is constructed from a broad intertextual field encompassing Christian and Gnostic motifs and allusions to the philosophy of the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus of Ephesus, all interwoven and engaging in dialogic relationships. The research demonstrates that religious themes in the novel are closely linked to philosophical and political aspects, and the extensive range of allusions and references allows for an interpretation of the work as a parable exploring the limits of evil and the ontological nature of will.

Interpretative Implications of an Authorial Emendation to the MS of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

Interpretative Implications of an Authorial Emendation to the MS of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

A Synthesis of the Christian, Gnostic, and Evolutionary Readings of Blood Meridian

ABSTRACT Scholars pursuing a gnostic reading of Blood Meridian have never explained why and with what consequences an archon might assume human form. Indeed, the train of interpretation, from Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion, McCarthy’s most likely source, through McCarthy to his gnostic interpreters, is a muddle, resting on a doubly misinterpreted gnostic text, the Hymn of the Pearl. But there is in fact a precedent in three other gnostic texts involving a story about the rape of Eve by embodied archons. Crucially, embodiment seems to entail intellectual declension, a diminishment of archonic understanding about the nature of themselves and the world. Thus, interpreting the judge as a human-embodied and intellectually diminished divine being who labors as an evolutionary scientist to piece together the methods of creation in which he previously partook is the best explanation for the available evidence in Blood Meridian. Historical scholarship on the Bible, including scholarship on apocalypse and gnosticism, in turn illuminates how the Christian and gnostic interpretations of Blood Meridian are a distinction without a difference. The novel’s condition is our essential human ignorance as to the number and moral character of the god(s), underscoring the necessity of synthesizing these three approaches into one.

Hinterland Horror: Geographical Extremity as Revelation in Blood Meridian and At the Mountains of Madness

ABSTRACT Despite its frequent depiction of atrocity, Cormac McCarthy’s oeuvre has received scant consideration as a contribution to genre horror. This article addresses this gap by reading Blood Meridian through the lens afforded by H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. It draws parallels between these texts’ depiction of frontiers in terms of experiences of metaphysical and moral extremity. Both Lovecraft’s Antarctica and McCarthy’s Southwestern wastes are encountered as sites not simply of jeopardy, but of dread. This terror emerges from the manner in which the natural becomes uncanny through apparent optical illusion. In both, mirage becomes the stuff of horror as its revelations unveil a true and more than earthly danger. For Lovecraft, the desolating reality uncovered by extreme geography is that terrestrial life began with extraterrestrial creators who concocted earth-life as a mere caprice: a flattening of metaphysics into physics that renders the universe utterly hostile and inhuman. McCarthy’s West offers a similarly terrifying mirror, a terra damnata whose hallucinatory geography also promises horrors, but of a less strictly natural sort. Notwithstanding critics’ emphasis on an optical democracy that erases human significance, what the altered perceptions of Blood Meridian’s hinterlands reveal is the abiding theological terror of human fallenness.

Struggling toward Empathic Witness in Blood Meridian

Abstract: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is often understood as a novel whose externalist narration, reprehensible characters, and extreme violence reject empathy. This essay draws on cognitive literary studies to argue that, rather than rejecting empathy, Blood Meridian strains productively against normative relationships between reader, novel, and empathy, relationships typically defined by comfort or seduction, to call readers to practice difficult empathy. By leaving characters' minds unnarrated, the novel creates a barrier to easy empathy and an opportunity for ambiguous, effortful empathic imagining. This externalist narration works in concert with the novel's conception of witnessing, which asserts the ethical stakes of attending to others' inner lives by suggesting that witnessing others with empathy enables one to "poison" Judge Holden's enterprise of violence. Embracing the novel's invitation to empathic witness equips readers to testify to the value of others' lives and to empathy's enduring ethical potential amid a culture of exploitation and war.

Settler Alienation in the American West: Alienation, Loneliness, and Colonial Masculinity in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

Settler Alienation in the American West: Alienation, Loneliness, and Colonial Masculinity in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

Symbolism and Allegory in the Works of Cormac McCarthy

ABSTRACT Cormac McCarthy’s ecocentric style has received continuous critical attention at least since Vereen Bell’s pioneering work in the early 1980s, and ultimately, critics seem to have settled on the term “optical democracy” as a shorthand for this style’s main feature: its ontological leveling, as in the oft-quoted passage in Blood Meridian, of all the world’s things. Labelling optical democracy a literary symbolism, and drawing on Charles Feidelson’s and Paul de Man’s theorizations of this form of writing, this article argues that McCarthy’s allegorical understanding of literature eventually comes to challenge his penchant for symbolism. To call attention to this development in McCarthy’s writing, the article discusses examples from his debut novel, considers unpublished material from the Wittliff archives, and finally shows how The Road serves as an autoreferential evaluation of the author’s own style.

The Kid’s Transformation, the Judge’s Rejuvenation: Subtle Referential Changes in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian Editions

ABSTRACT In the transition from early to later editions of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, sometimes the designation of the protagonist subtly changes from “the kid” to “the lad.” This shift uncovers significant instances of the protagonist’s internal development, characterised by degeneration, gravitation towards established structures, realisation of compassion, and ongoing self-reflection, leading to his precocious maturity. Such maturity makes him a formidable adversary to the judge. The years 1861 and 1878, mentioned within the narrative, underscore the protagonist’s growth as a mirror to the United States’ transformation from frontier expansion to forced assimilation and finally, to economic imperialism. The judge’s ultimate absorption of the protagonist epitomises the nation’s rejuvenation and the refinement of its mechanisms for systemic oppression and deceit in a modern era. The endurance of the judge’s evil deeds underscores an ongoing cycle of rejuvenation, yet the enduring resistance of autonomous individuals, as epitomised by the protagonist, persists.

Mapping identity and N’deé ethnicity in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Alvaro Enrigue’s Ahora me rindo y eso es todo

Both Cormac McCarthy´s Blood Meridian and Álvaro Enrigue’s Now I Surrender and That is All take place on the northern border of Mexico and the southern border of the United States, at two overlapping periods in the XIX century. This paper discusses the two perspectives emanating from the border conformation between the consolidating Nation States and how the genocide against de N’deé nation —specifically the Chiricahua group— has been added into the plot of the narratives analyzed to preserve cultural representations of the indigenous nation.

No Country for God: The Brutality of Western Territorial Appropriation in Blood Meridian

Abstract In 1985 American author Cormac McCarthy published Blood Meridian, a novel that is set against the backdrop of the conquest of the West, a momentous and still relevant process that has acquired quasi-mythical dimensions throughout history and that is undoubtedly embedded in the United States’ national consciousness. In this article I will show the different mechanisms employed by Cormac McCarthy to deconstruct conventional Western narratives that glorify and sanction the Westward expansion as a courageous endeavour that shaped the American nation, hence underplaying the more devastating and pernicious side of this chapter of America’s imperialistic undertakings. To that end, I will argue that McCarthy contests the main tenets of the crucial 1893 Frontier Thesis proposed by Frederick Jackson Turner, in particular the depiction of American colonial expansion as a source of progress and democratic development; likewise I will contend that, in Blood Meridian, McCarthy aligns himself with the ideas of New Western Historians that offer a revisionist perspective of the country’s past, revealing such brutality and wickedness exerted in the appropriation of the western territories that seemed to deprive the process of any hope of God’s mercy.

Religion Between the Parody of Faith and the Epiphany of Grace in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

ABSTRACT The metaphysical inquiry of Blood Meridian is structured in two moments, both involving a reflection on religion. On the one hand, the persistence of violence in the novel can be interpreted as the continuous denial of the Christian idea of “salvation through faith.” Faith, in this book, offers neither salvation for those who suffer nor punishment for evil, as it is immediately stated that “It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing.” On the other hand, although the Christian God seemingly disappears from the phenomenal world, the search for a higher instance does not completely vanish from the novel. In fact, fleeting divine occurrences frequently appear throughout the novel in various transient epiphanies of grace. After grace vanishes, we can detect in the last chapters of Blood Meridian an abysmal melancholy—an expression of frustrated attempts to transcend human existence. Although this dark path traveled by the kid in Blood Meridian has led critics to call the book a Gnostic parable, these two possibilities of McCarthy’s metaphysical reflection seem to be closely related to Catholic motifs and ideology.

The omnipresent character and possible worlds theory

Fictional texts might present storyworlds that include both human characters and omnipresent characters. When they share the same ontological plane the specific dynamic occurs between them. Furthermore omnipresent characters may be able to transgress a singular plane, in consequence making the whole storyworld appear more complex, but also seem less coherent. This essay focuses on the case of Judge Holden, the antagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, in order to dissect the role of an omnipresent character within the fictional world. The introduction contextualizes the figure of an omnipresent character, by explicating its nature on the background of other texts and their characters. Applying the possible worlds theory adapted by literary theorist Marie-Laure Ryan serves as the adequate means of analysis. Her take on possible worlds theory enables to make a clear distinctions between ontological planes that an omnipresent character occupies and define what it means for the reader.

After Babel, the Horizontal War: City and Technique in Jacques Ellul

Jacques Ellul is best known for his The Technological Society (1954), which outlines a sociological treatment of Technique; that is, the total technical phenomenon including but extending far beyond machines. Lesser known are Ellul’s theological works, though these relate plainly to the sociological. Of particular relevance to Technique is his theological treatment of civilisation in The Meaning of the City (1970). These two texts stand alone and yet, read together, are mutually illuminating. The present paper will follow this light from the ancient City to the Technique of modernity. This will entail first a focus on four Scriptural cities: Enoch, Resen, Babel, Nineveh. The way will then proceed via a literary route, through Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, in which the abstractions here discussed are rendered palpable as flesh and blood. This detour will attend to those aspects of war and scalp-hunting which are central to McCarthy’s text, especially in light of the epistemic enterprise of one of modern literature’s most memorable characters: Judge Holden. The relation between the City and Technique will be followed by tracing the metaphysics of inscription which is a corollary to the project of epistemic legibility that underpins the movement of Technique. This enterprise will be understood as a confluence of Babel and Nineveh, a spiritual war that seeks to exclude God by enfolding the totality of existence into a humanly-determined order. The relation between the city, this process of inscription, and the nature of Technique will then be discussed.

Blood Meridian's Chronotopic Gates: Reading Cormac McCarthy through the Lens of a Literary-Historical GIS

This geographical information systems (GIS) reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) provides a literary geography analysis that plots latitude and longitude coordinates in conjunction with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s chronotopes of the Road, the Rabelaisian, the Petty-Bourgeois Provincial Town, the Threshold and the political cartography of the United States–Mexico border established by the 1849 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to map the emergence of an American Imperial chronotope. Blood Meridian is a fictionalized account of historical events carried out by the Glanton Gang, a band of mercenaries contracted by Governor Trias in 1849 to counter the threat of Apache raids in Chihuahua province, Mexico. Viewed through the lenses of a GIS/MAXQDA platform, Blood Meridian comes into focus as ‘cartographical novel’ illuminating its literary geography as a melange, spun from allusions to and spatial remediations of Classical, medieval and Indigenous mythologies. The GIS/MAXQDA platform frames Blood Meridian as deep chronotopic map that, in tracing the spiralling lifepath of its protagonist, the ‘Kid’, across the terra damnata of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, creates an analogy and spatial metaphor for the violent geographical teleology of US nineteenth-century westward expansion which unfolded between the 1830s and 1880s.

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.

Óðinn’s Avatar: McCarthy’s Judge Holden in Blood Meridian

ABSTRACT In contrast to studies that establish superficial resemblances between Judge Holden of Blood Meridian and such monolithic forces of evil and destruction as the archons of Gnostic religious tradition, this article equates this larger-than-life figure with Odin, the Norse god of war. Affinities are established with this paramount god in such spheres as the patronage of battle rage and poetic inspiration; law and judgment; the absence of a moral dimension; the search for knowledge as a means to power; interrogation of the dead; shamanism and spirit travel; the hosting of a select company of fallen warriors in Valhalla; dandyism, joviality, and storytelling, but also in such darker areas as illusion, deceit, betrayal, whimsy and the gratuitous act. Preeminent is the vision of war as central to all life. Despite Holden’s claim that he cannot be fully known, the most plausible source for McCarthy’s adaptation of Odin is H. R. Ellis Davison’s Gods and Myths of Northern Europe, first published in 1964 and reissued as Gods and Myths of the Viking Age in 1981.

Judge, the Idiot, and Cormac McCarhty’s Critique of Violence in Blood Meridian

The following paper examines the relation between the couple made up by Judge Holden and the Idiot in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. Set in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the mid-nineteenth century, McCarthy’s novel is an exploration of the violence underlying the march of American colonial westward expansion in which Judge Holden is a symbol of the desire to dominate others through the use of violence. As such, Holden is confronted and complemented by the figure of the Idiot. The latter works as a degraded, helpless and even more grotesque version of the Judge, and throughout the novel parallelisms and contrasts are established between the two characters. In many passages one mirrors the other; at other times, both make up a unity that reveals the full extent of Holden’s brutal ideology, with the idiot as its mute critic. Finally, the relations that this paper aims to expose may be read as a commentary on the irrationality of a philosophy that celebrates and legitimizes violence not only as a goal in itself, but also as the only way in which human beings can relate to one another.

Cosmic Egg and Infant Demiurge: Antecedents of McCarthy’s Judge Holden (Blood Meridian)

Cosmic Egg and Infant Demiurge: Antecedents of McCarthy’s Judge Holden (Blood Meridian)

Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned

Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned

A Literary Forerunner to Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: S. Behrman in Frank Norris’s The Octopus

A Literary Forerunner to Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: S. Behrman in Frank Norris’s The Octopus