Blood Meridian

• 1. Introduction

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  Blood Meridian, a 1985 novel from Random House, begins with a birth under a meteor storm. Its hero is born in Tennessee in 1833, during the Leonids meteor shower, and he is never given a name. Cormac McCarthy calls him only "the kid." His mother dies in childbirth, he cannot read, and at 14 he runs away from his father and sister.

  The full title is Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. Critics have filed it under two labels: the anti-Western and the Gothic Western. From Tennessee the kid drifts into Texas and then Mexico, where he falls in with a real band of scalp hunters who killed for bounty in the borderlands between 1849 and 1850.

  The book leaves several questions hanging over the listener. Who is the enormous, educated figure who shadows the kid across the frontier, and is he even a man? How far did McCarthy go to root a story this strange in documented history? Why does a novel soaked in slaughter now sit near the top of lists of great American fiction? What really happens in its final scene? And why has no film-maker managed to put it on a screen?

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• 2. The Judge

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  In a tent in Nacogdoches, Texas, a reverend is in the middle of a sermon when a huge man walks in and denounces him. Judge Holden announces that the preacher is a wanted imposter, recites a long list of crimes, and stirs the crowd until it lynches the man. Moments later he admits he had never met the reverend. The killing served no purpose at all. The kid slips away, and as he flees town the judge smiles at him.

  Everything else about Holden is built on the same scale. He is physically massive, pale and entirely hairless, and the novel leaves open whether he is supernatural. He speaks many languages, studies and records the natural world, and is far better educated than the rough men around him. The gang is said to have found him sitting alone on a rock in the middle of the desert.

  His learning is put to deadly use. When the gang runs out of gunpowder with Apaches in pursuit, Holden leads the men to natural resources and gathers what he needs to make powder. The novel hints that he and the gang's captain share some kind of pact.

  Beneath the learning sits a creed. Holden sees the world as violent, fatalistic and trapped in an endless cycle of conquest, with war defining what people are. He lays out these beliefs in speeches and stories scattered across the book. After the gang falls apart he gradually becomes the kid's antagonist, turning up for brief reunions.

  Holden also collects strays. James Robert Bell, known as the idiot, wanders into the Colorado River one night and nearly drowns, and the judge pulls him out. Bell stays attached to him from then on and is later seen on a leash. By the time the judge visits the kid in a San Diego jail, Bell is gone, and the novel never says what became of him.

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• 3. Glanton's Gang

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  Captain White, an American veteran who believes Mexico is a lawless nation destined to be conquered, leads the kid into the desert at the head of a ragged, ill-equipped company of filibusters. Weeks into the march, Comanche warriors overwhelm them. White escapes with a few of his officers but is caught and beheaded. Later, in a Chihuahua City jail, Mexican soldiers show the kid White's preserved head in a jar, and the kid denies any connection to him.

  In that same jail he meets Louis Toadvine again, an outlaw with no ears and a forehead branded with the letters H, T and F. Toadvine lies his way into a deal that frees the kid, himself and one more inmate into the gang of John Joel Glanton. Glanton is a former Texas Ranger and cavalry veteran. He is small, black-haired and a clever strategist, with a wife and child back in Texas.

  The gang first contracts to protect Chihuahua from marauding Apaches, and is paid for each scalp. Soon its men kill anyone who can supply a passable scalp for a higher share, including residents of Mexican villages. When officials realize the fraud, a bounty is placed on Glanton himself.

  At the Colorado River the gang finds a ferry and takes it by conspiring with the nearby Yumas, then betraying them. The men settle in and exploit travelers until the Yumas turn on them in a massacre that kills Glanton and many others. Two men in the gang share the name John Jackson, one Black and one White. After the White Jackson threatens the other at a campfire, the Black Jackson decapitates him. That same Jackson wears the judge's style of robes, and he is the first to die in the Yuma attack.

  The survivors scatter. Ben Tobin, a former novice of the Society of Jesus, urges the kid again and again to shoot the judge. In Los Angeles, Toadvine and David Brown are hanged, and the kid buys Brown's necklace of human ears from a soldier and begins to wear it.

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• 4. Research and Prose

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  In 1974, McCarthy left his native Tennessee for El Paso, Texas, hoping to absorb the culture and geography of the American Southwest. He taught himself Spanish, which many characters in the novel speak. Blood Meridian was his fifth book, his first western, and his first novel set in the Southwest rather than in Appalachia.

  The writing stretched over years. He began in the mid-1970s, and in a letter around 1979 he said he had not touched the manuscript for six months out of frustration. Yet large stretches arrived in a single sitting, including the passage about a "legion of horribles, hundreds in number." In 1981 he was living on money from a MacArthur Fellows grant while he worked.

  History sits under nearly every page. Critics have repeatedly shown that even brief, seemingly inconsequential passages rest on evidence, and one description calls the book as close to history as novels generally get. McCarthy retraced the Glanton gang's route through Mexico more than once, noting the topography and fauna. He even studied homemade gunpowder so that the judge's recipe, made from volcanic rock, would be accurate.

  The gang chapters draw on Samuel Chamberlain's memoir, My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue. Chamberlain rode with Glanton between 1849 and 1850, and he describes a Judge Holden of Texas who stood six foot six in his moccasins. "Who or what he was no one knew," Chamberlain writes, adding that he was "by far the best educated man in northern Mexico." Outside that memoir, Holden is otherwise unknown. McCarthy added his judge to the manuscript in the late 1970s, a figure described as a patchwork of Kurtz and Milton's Satan alongside Chamberlain's account.

  The prose looks as unusual as the history is exact. McCarthy used archaic words, untranslated Spanish dialogue, no quotation marks, and no apostrophes in most contractions. He told Oprah Winfrey that he preferred "simple declarative sentences" and never used semicolons, since he saw no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks." The New York Times called the result Faulknerian.

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• 5. The Weight of Violence

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  Harold Bloom, who ranks Blood Meridian among the finest American novels of the 20th century, admitted that his first two attempts to read it failed. He had flinched, he said, from the overwhelming carnage. Other critics have tried to explain what the bloodshed is for.

  Caryn James of The New York Times argued that the violence is a slap in the face to modern readers cut off from brutality. She also noted that McCarthy shows people of every background as capable of evil, against revisionist theories that cast white men as villains and Indians as victims. Terrence Morgan found the effect shocking at first, then fading until the reader grows numb.

  Billy J. Stratton, writing in Arizona Quarterly, reads the brutality as McCarthy's tool for attacking the conventional story of the Old West. Characters often behave more like animals than humans, and no recognizable hero stands in the way. James D. Lilley offers a blunter view. In McCarthy, he argues, violence is just violence and not a sign or symbol of something else.

  The book signals its subject before page one. Three epigraphs open it, from the French writer Paul Valéry, from the German mystic Jakob Böhme, and from a 1982 Yuma Sun clipping. The clipping reports a claim by members of an Ethiopian excavation that a fossilized skull some three hundred millennia old appeared to have been scalped. David H. Evans reads that as a hint that scalp-taking is as old as the species itself.

  The Böhme quotation has drawn the most argument of the three, and it points toward the religious and philosophical readings of the novel.

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• 6. Gods and Wars

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  David Vann reads the southwest landscape the gang crosses as hell itself. In support, he says the judge's kick at a head echoes a similar kick by Dante in the Inferno.

  The Böhme epigraph says that sorrow is swallowed up in death, and that "death and dying are the very life of the darkness." Critics agree that Gnostic ideas run through the novel but dispute what they mean. Leo Daugherty argues that Gnostic thought is central, specifically its Persian-Zoroastrian-Manichean branch. He sees Holden as an archon and the kid as a "failed pneuma" who feels a "spark of the alien divine." For Daugherty, Gnostic evil was far larger than the tame Christian Satan. In his words, "evil was simply everything that is," apart from bits of spirit imprisoned in the world. Barcley Owens replies that the argument is "ultimately unsuccessful," since it ignores the pervasive violence and overstates the kid's goodness.

  In his notes for the first draft, McCarthy copied down a fragment from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. He marked it as the source for the judge's lines such as "war is god." Fragment 53 reads that war is father of all and king of all, making some gods and some men, some slaves and some free. Ian Alexander Moore argues that this gives the judge a coherent, if disquieting, metaphysics in which Being is itself warfare. On that reading, the kid falls because of his clemency, his refusal to attune himself to reality's polemic nature.

  Douglas Canfield holds that the central theme is theodicy, the question of how goodness can be justified when evil exists. James Wood takes a similar position. Chris Dacus prefers to read theodicy in eschatological terms, set against the last judgment, and Bloom backed that reading by calling the novel "The Authentic Apocalyptic Novel" again and again.

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• 7. The Jakes and the Post Auger

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  In 1878, the kid is 45 and the novel now calls him "the man." He invites a lone group of youths to share his fire. The boys are drawn to his necklace of ears, the mood turns, one challenges him and later tries to shoot him, and the man kills the boy.

  He then rides to Fort Griffin, Texas, and walks into a bar with a dancing bear. Across the room sits the judge, who has not aged. A patron kills the bear, and in the confusion the judge appears beside the man. The two talk about violence, war and fate. When the man steps outside to the outhouse, which the book calls the jakes, he opens the door and finds the judge standing naked inside. The judge grins, gathers him in and latches the door.

  Two drunken men leave the bar a short while later to see what the commotion was. They look in and recoil in horror, and the narrator never says what they saw. In a book that is otherwise explicit about violence, the silence has drawn endless comment. Many critics assert that Holden murdered the kid. Others propose that he humiliated and sexually assaulted him, or that the outcome is meant to be unknowable.

  Back in the dance hall, the naked judge dances and plays a fiddle. He never sleeps, he says, and he will never die.

  The epilogue is just as opaque. It follows a man crossing the plain and digging holes with a tool that is probably a Vaughan post auger. That tool dug fence-post holes for the barbed wire that settlers strung up as they claimed ranches across the West. The narrator says the digging "enkindles the hole," a phrase that echoes hole striking, a metalworking process. Fire is a major motif in the novel, and metalworking appears in a famous passage where the kid dreams of the judge watching a metal worker.

  Behind the digger trail bone pickers, an occupation born in the late 1860s. The bones of the massive numbers of slaughtered buffalo could by then be collected and shipped to carbon and fertilizer factories in the Eastern United States.

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• 8. Acclaim and Adaptation

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  In 2006, The New York Times polled writers and critics on the most important American fiction of the previous 25 years, and Blood Meridian finished as a runner-up. That was a long way from its first reception, when the book got little recognition. Time magazine later placed it on its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. Aleksandar Hemon called it possibly the greatest American novel of the past 25 years. David Foster Wallace named it one of the five most underappreciated American novels since 1960 and called it probably the most horrifying book of the 20th century, at least in fiction.

  Agreement on its meaning has been harder to find. Dana Phillips says the book seems designed to elude interpretation. Scholars have called it nihilistic or strongly moral, a satire of the western or a savage indictment of Manifest Destiny. Bloom called it the ultimate western. J. Douglas Canfield described a grotesque Bildungsroman that denies us nearly all access to its protagonist's consciousness. Richard Selzer judged McCarthy a genius and probably somewhat insane. Steven Shaviro wrote that only Moby-Dick bears comparison, and that McCarthy writes with an even more terrible clarity.

  Many readers saw a film in it from the start. The New York Times review in 1985 spoke of scenes that might have come off a movie screen. Yet every attempt has collapsed in development or pre-production. In 1995 the screenwriter Steve Tesich wrote a first adaptation. In the late 1990s Tommy Lee Jones acquired the rights and rewrote the script, planning to direct and act in it, but studios shied away from the violence.

  After Kingdom of Heaven wrapped in 2004, the screenwriter William Monahan and the director Ridley Scott talked with the producer Scott Rudin about a version financed by Paramount Pictures. In a 2008 interview with Eclipse Magazine, Scott confirmed the script existed but said the extensive violence was a challenge for film standards. He and Monahan eventually left.

  By early 2011, James Franco was considering the book. Persuaded by Andrew Dominik, he shot 25 minutes of test footage starring Scott Glenn, Mark Pellegrino, Luke Perry and Dave Franco. Rudin denied further production for undisclosed reasons. On the 5th of May 2016, Variety reported that Franco was negotiating with Rudin to write and direct, with Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan and Vincent D'Onofrio attached. The project dissolved the same day over rights.

  McCarthy himself rejected the idea that the book is unfilmable. In a 2009 interview with The Wall Street Journal, he said it would be very difficult and would need someone with a bountiful imagination, but that "the payoff could be extraordinary." In 2023, Deadline reported that New Regency was adapting the novel, with John Hillcoat, who had directed The Road, set to direct. McCarthy and his son John Francis were to serve as executive producers. McCarthy died on the 13th of June 2023 and keeps a posthumous credit. John Logan was later announced as writer.

  In a 2024 interview, Hillcoat said he and McCarthy had spent long hours discussing the film. The author once volunteered to write it himself, imagining a Faustian tale of the judge trying to win the kid's soul and consume everything in his path. McCarthy had turned down a miniseries proposal, because television lacks what he called a kind of grandeur and an element of scale.

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