Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 epic historical novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, classified under the Western, or sometimes the anti-Western, genre. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House.
Set in the American frontier with a loose historical context, the narrative follows a fictional teenager from Tennessee referred to as "the kid", with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred American Indians and others in the United States–Mexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850 for bounty, sadistic pleasure, and eventually out of nihilistic habit. The role of antagonist is gradually filled by Judge Holden, a physically massive, highly educated, preternaturally skilled member of the gang with pale and hairless skin who takes extreme sadistic pleasure in the destruction and domination of whatever he encounters, including children and docile animals.
Although the novel initially received lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since become highly acclaimed and is widely recognized as McCarthy's magnum opus and one of the greatest American novels of all time. Some have labelled it the Great American Novel.
The novel tells the story of a runaway referred to as "the kid", who was born in Tennessee during the great meteor shower of 1833. He first meets the mysterious scalp hunter "Judge" Holden at a revival in a tent in Nacogdoches, Texas.
He joins a party of U.S Army irregulars on a mission led by Captain White. White's group is overwhelmed by a Comanche Indian war party, and few of them survive. The kid is captured, but set free when his acquaintance tells the authorities they will become hunters. They eventually join John Joel Glanton and his gang, who travel and make money by scalping natives.
The gang first meets Judge Holden while fleeing for their lives from a group. They find Holden sitting on a boulder, where he is waiting for and expecting the gang. They agree to follow his leadership, and he takes them to a volcano where he instructs them on how to manufacture gunpowder with the volcano's resources. Tobin tells the kid that each man in the gang claims to have met the Judge at some point before joining.
The gang travels across the Southern United States and Mexico, causing destruction wherever they go. They realize eventually that no one can tell the difference between a Mexican scalp and a native scalp, and so they destroy villages at random and scalp their inhabitants.
The gang crosses into the Mexican Cession, where they set up an operation on a ferry on the Colorado River at Yuma, Arizona. Indians are at first approached to help the gang wrest control of the ferry from its owners, but Glanton's gang betrays and slaughters the Indians and the passengers so they can plunder the ferry and frame the Indians for the attack. The Yumas attack and kill almost all of the gang in a second wave, including Glanton.
Having survived the massacre, the kid and Tobin flee into the desert. Heading west, they encounter Toadvine and Judge Holden at a watering hole. The Judge buys Toadvine's hat and offers a vast sum of gold for the kid's only pistol. Tobin urges the kid to shoot Holden while he is unarmed, but the kid refuses, and they continue traveling westward. They pass David Brown, who is riding east, and tell him of the massacre. Later, while drinking at a creek, the kid is shot at by the Judge, who has acquired Brown's rifle and is hunting them across the desert. Tobin is shot through the neck but survives. The pair hide in a pile of bones and the Judge passes them without seeing them. In the morning, they are rescued by a party of Diegueno Indians.
The kid and Tobin continue through the mountains and eventually arrive in San Diego, California. The kid is separated from Tobin and imprisoned. Holden visits the kid in jail, and tells him that he has told the jailers "the truth". The kid is released on recognizance and seeks a doctor to treat his wound. He hallucinates a visit from Holden along with a man who forges coins, and learns what Holden is judge of, and that "the night does not end". After recovering, he makes his way to Los Angeles, searching unsuccessfully for Tobin. In the city, he witnesses the hanging of Toadvine and Brown.
For the next few years, the kid wanders nomadically throughout the region, working at various trades and witnessing the San Francisco fires of 1851 and 1863. He comes to own a few meager possessions. When he is twenty-eight years old, the kid comes across a pilgrimage of flagellants making its way through the mountains; the next day, he finds their bodies, hacked to pieces in the rocks. Nearby, he finds an old woman and begs her to come with him to safety, but she turns out to be a dried corpse, who "had been dead in that place for years."
In 1878, the kid, now referred to as "the man," is traveling through northern Texas, towards Fort Griffin. He encounters an old buffalo hunter who tells him of the vast bison herds that once roamed the country. Several days later, he meets a group of young bone-pickers led by a boy named Elrod. Elrod and the man get into an argument, and Elrod returns to the man's camp at night to kill him, but the man anticipates this and shoots him instead. In the morning, the bone-pickers come to collect Elrod's body and rifle before departing.
Upon arriving in Fort Griffin, the man enters a saloon and meets Judge Holden, who seems unchanged despite the intervening years. Holden converses with him, calling him "the last of the true," and declaring that both he and the man are there for a mysterious "dance." The man leaves and solicits the services of a prostitute, but finds himself impotent. Going outside to relieve himself, the man is surprised by Holden in an outhouse; Holden envelopes him in an embrace before shutting the door behind him. Later, two men open the door and gaze inside in horror. The ending of the book finds the Judge in the midst of a frenzied dance inside the saloon. Towering above the other dancers, he triumphantly proclaims that he will never die.
In the epilogue, an unnamed man is making lines of holes across the plains with a steel implement. He sparks a fire in each hole, and an assortment of wanderers trails behind him.
A major theme is the warlike nature of man. Critic Harold Bloom praised Blood Meridian as one of the best 20th century American novels, "worthy of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick," but admitted that his "first two attempts to read through Blood Meridian failed, because [he] flinched from the overwhelming carnage".
Caryn James of The New York Times argued that the novel's violence was a "slap in the face" to modern readers cut off from brutality. Terrence Morgan thought the effect of the violence initially shocking but then waned until the reader was desensitized. Billy J. Stratton of Arizona Quarterly contends that the brutality is the primary mechanism through which McCarthy challenges the "oppositional structure" of the conventional narrative of the Old West; "[R]eaders encounter characters that are often depicted as more animal than human in their behaviors, participating in a ruthless struggle for fortune and power. It is the absence of a recognizable heroic character along with the negation of the Eurocentric oppositions that McCarthy's deployment of animal imagery is meant to illuminate."
James D. Lilley argues that many critics struggle with the fact that McCarthy does not use violence for "jury-rigged, symbolic plot resolutions ... In McCarthy's work, violence tends to be just that; it is not a sign or symbol of something else." In her aforementioned review, Caryn James noted that McCarthy depicts characters of all backgrounds as evil, in contrast to contemporary "revisionist theories that make white men the villains and Indians the victims."
Three epigraphs open the book: quotations from French writer Paul Valéry, from German Christian mystic Jakob Böhme, and a 1982 news clipping from the Yuma Sun reporting the claim of members of an Ethiopian archeological excavation that a fossilized skull three hundred millennia old seemed to have been scalped. Regarding the meaning of the epigraphs, David H. Evans writes that
The narrative closes with ambiguity pertaining to the final state of the kid, or the man. Since the book portrays violence in explicit detail, this allusive portrayal has caused comment. Given Judge Holden's history and other details in the text, he presumably rapes the man before killing him. Alternatively, perhaps the point is that readers can never know.
David Vann argues that the setting of the American southwest which the Gang traverses is representative of hell. Vann claims that the Judge's kicking of a head is an allusion to Dante's similar action in the Inferno.
The second of the three epigraphs which introduce the novel, taken from the Christian theosophist Jakob Böhme, has incited varied discussion. The quote from Boehme is:
No specific conclusions have been reached about its interpretation nor relevance to the novel. Critics agree that there are Gnostic elements in Blood Meridian, but they disagree on the precise meaning and implication of those elements.
Leo Daugherty argues that "Gnostic thought is central to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian", (Daugherty, 122) specifically the Persian-Zoroastrian-Manichean branch of Gnosticism. He describes the novel as a "rare coupling of Gnostic 'ideology' with the 'affect' of Hellenic tragedy by means of depicting how power works in the making and erasing of culture, and of what the human condition amounts to when a person opposes that power and thence gets introduced to fate." Daugherty sees Holden as an archon and the kid as a "failed pneuma." He says that the kid feels a "spark of the alien divine."
Daugherty further contends that the violence of the novel can best be understood through a Gnostic lens. "Evil" as defined by the Gnostics was a far larger, more pervasive presence in human life than the rather tame and "domesticated" Satan of Christianity. As Daugherty writes, "For [Gnostics], evil was simply everything that is, with the exception of bits of spirit imprisoned here. And what they saw is what we see in the world of Blood Meridian."
However, Barcley Owens argues that while there are undoubtedly Gnostic qualities to the novel, Daugherty's arguments are "ultimately unsuccessful," because Daugherty fails to adequately address the pervasive violence and because he overstates the kid's goodness.
Douglas Canfield asserts that theodicy is the central theme of Blood Meridian. James Wood took a similar position, recognizing as a recurrent theme in the novel the issue of the general justification of metaphysical goodness in the presence of evil. Chris Dacus expressed his preference for discussing the theme of theodicy in its eschatological terms in comparison to the theological scene of the last judgment.[1] This preference for reading theodicy as an eschatological theme was further affirmed by Harold Bloom in his recurrent phrase of referring to the novel as "The Authentic Apocalyptic Novel."
McCarthy began writing Blood Meridian in the mid-1970s. In a letter sent around 1979 he said that he had not touched Blood Meridian in six months out of frustration. Nonetheless, significant parts of the final book were written in one go, "including the astonishing 'legion of horribles' passage".
McCarthy worked on the novel while living on the money he received from his MacArthur Fellows grant in 1981. It was his first attempt at a western and his first novel set in the Southwestern United States, a change from the Appalachian settings of his earlier work.
In 1974, McCarthy moved from his native Tennessee to El Paso, Texas, to immerse himself in the culture and geography of the American Southwest. He taught himself Spanish, which many of the characters of Blood Meridian speak. McCarthy conducted considerable research to write the book. Critics have repeatedly demonstrated that even brief and seemingly inconsequential passages of Blood Meridian rely on historical evidence. The book has been described as "as close to history as novels generally get".
The Glanton gang segments are based on Samuel Chamberlain's account of the group in his memoir My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue. Chamberlain rode with John Joel Glanton and his company between 1849 and 1850. Judge Holden is described in Chamberlain's account but is otherwise unknown. Chamberlain writes:
McCarthy's Judge was added to his manuscript in the late 1970s, a "grotesque patchwork of up-river Kurtz and Milton's Satan" and Chamberlain's account.
McCarthy physically retraced the Glanton Gang's path through Mexico multiple times, and noted topography and fauna. He studied such topics as homemade gunpowder to accurately depict the Judge's creation from volcanic rock.
McCarthy's writing style involves many unusual or archaic words, dialogue in Spanish, no quotation marks for dialogue, and no apostrophes to signal most contractions. McCarthy told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that he preferred "simple declarative sentences" and that he used capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but never semicolons. He believed there was no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks". The New York Times described McCarthy's prose in Blood Meridian as "Faulknerian". Describing events of extreme violence, McCarthy's prose is sparse yet expansive, with an often biblical quality and frequent religious references.
Blood Meridian initially received little recognition, but has since been recognized as a masterpiece and one of the greatest works of American literature. Some have called it the Great American Novel. American literary critic Harold Bloom praised Blood Meridian as one of the 20th century's finest novels. Aleksandar Hemon has 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 "[p]robably the most horrifying book of this [20th] century, at least [in] fiction."
Time magazine included Blood Meridian in its "Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005". In 2010 The New York Times conducted a poll of writers and critics regarding the most important works in American fiction from the previous 25 years, and Blood Meridian was a runner-up.
There has been no consensus in the interpretation of the novel. Americanist Dana Phillips said that the work "seems designed to elude interpretation". One scholar has described Blood Meridian as:
Nonetheless, academics and critics have suggested that Blood Meridian is nihilistic or strongly moral, a satire of the western genre or a savage indictment of Manifest Destiny. Harold Bloom called it "the ultimate western". J. Douglas Canfield described it as "a grotesque Bildungsroman in which we are denied access to the protagonist's consciousness almost entirely". Richard Selzer declared that McCarthy "is a genius – also probably somewhat insane." Critic Steven Shaviro wrote:
Since the novel's release many have noted its cinematic potential. The New York Times' 1985 review noted that the novel depicted "scenes that might have come off a movie screen". There have been attempts to create a motion picture adaptation of Blood Meridian, but all have failed during the development or pre-production stages. A common perception is that the story is "unfilmable" due to its unrelenting violence and dark tone. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2009 McCarthy denied this notion, with his perspective being that it would be "very difficult to do and would require someone with a bountiful imagination and a lot of balls. But the payoff could be extraordinary."
Screenwriter Steve Tesich first adapted Blood Meridian into a screenplay in 1995. In the late 1990s, Tommy Lee Jones acquired the film adaptation rights to the story and subsequently rewrote Tesich's screenplay with the idea of directing and playing a role in it. The production could not move forward due to film studios avoiding the project's overall violence.
Following the end of production for Kingdom of Heaven in 2004, screenwriter William Monahan and director Ridley Scott entered discussions with producer Scott Rudin for adapting Blood Meridian with Paramount Pictures financing. In a 2008 interview with Eclipse Magazine Scott confirmed that the screenplay had been written, but that the extensive violence was proving to be a challenge for film standards. This later led to Scott and Monahan leaving the project, resulting in another abandoned adaptation.
By early 2011, James Franco was considering adapting Blood Meridian, along with a number of other William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy novels. After being persuaded by Andrew Dominik to adapt the novel, Franco shot 25 minutes of test footage starring Scott Glenn, Mark Pellegrino, Luke Perry, and Dave Franco. For undisclosed reasons, Rudin denied further production of the film. On May 5, 2016, Variety revealed that Franco was negotiating with Rudin to write and direct an adaptation to be brought to the Marché du Film, starring Russell Crowe, Tye Sheridan, and Vincent D'Onofrio. However, it was reported later that day that the project dissolved due to issues with the film rights.
In 2023, Deadline reported that New Regency is adapting Blood Meridian as a feature film. John Hillcoat, who previously directed an adaptation of McCarthy's novel The Road, is set to direct. Alongside his son John Francis, McCarthy was set to serve as an executive producer on the film; he will retain a posthumous credit following his death on June 13, 2023. John Logan was later announced to be adapting the story.
In a 2024 interview, Hillcoat said he and McCarthy spent extended time discussing the film, which the author once volunteered to write and envisioned as a "Faustian tale, the journey of the Judge trying to win the soul of the kid, and consume everything in his path." McCarthy had rejected a miniseries proposal, finding television lacks a "kind of grandeur about it, an element of scale."