SOURCE: Schopen, Bernard A. “‘They Rode On’: Blood Meridian and the Art of Narrative.” Western American Literature 30, no. 2 (summer 1995): 179-94.

[In the following essay, Schopen studies McCarthy's complexly integrated narrative structures in Blood Meridian, deeming that these elements fuse together to form a truthful assessment of the nature of humanity.]

Since its publication in 1985, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West has received little serious criticism. This remarkable neglect of what Denis Donoghue calls “one of the most powerful American novels I have read” (6) is about to end, however. Now that All The Pretty Horses has garnered a National Book Award and The Crossing leaped up the best-seller list, McCarthy threatens to become an academically fashionable, perhaps even a canonical figure, and we can expect that his novels will increasingly be “interrogated” into confessing that they are cultural documents desperately in need of “post-something” reading and ideological excavation.¹ Insofar as Blood Meridian is concerned, however, cultural and ideological critics will need to consider that what draws our attention to the novel in the first place is thoroughly literary. While certainly the study of la bête humaine and the philosophical inquiry that reviewers and critics would have it, Blood Meridian is first and finally a novel, an imitation of an action informed by the principles of a consummate narrative art.

Thus McCarthy's masterpiece all but demands that it be read in literary—that is, formal—terms, for only an examination of its art can suggest why Blood Meridian has powerfully engaged and affected its readers as have few other American novels. And such a reading demonstrates that, while McCarthy's art is everywhere in evidence, it is most apparent in the shaping voice of his narrator and the haunting story this voice literally constructs as it speaks to us, in the complex structure that the narrator imposes on the material, in the tragic action that he invents for the central character, and in the repetition of words, phrases, and images to which the narrator almost obsessively harkens back in an attempt to come to terms with—if not to explain—the mystery lurking in the depths of the human heart and at the center of McCarthy's novel.

I

Any consideration of a prose fiction as art must reckon with its medium. But while all of Blood Meridian's critics agree that it is a stylistic tour de force and attribute to McCarthy a style “biblical” or “baroque,” “highly wrought” (Moran), and even “gorgeous” (Shaviro), no one attempts to assess the effects of its language. Donoghue approaches the subject when he notes the polysemous nature of the text and observes that its “many styles and dictions” employ a lexicon of archaic or abstruse “hard words” that “help McCarthy to control the pace of one's reading” (Donoghue 7; see also Shaviro 117-18).² But more than “hard words” exert this control; most of the rhetorical devices available to the writer in English contribute to it and to the effects it produces.

For illustration we need go no further than the novel's opening paragraph:

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him.

(3)

Other than the Ecce Homo echo and the use of the present tense, this contains nothing especially unusual, and nary a “hard word.” Yet the passage is remarkable in effect, as faintly odd as it is quietly beautiful. The unconventional punctuation disturbing the simplicity of the sentences; the repetition, subtly of “thin” and less subtly of “He,” reinforcing the lyrical rhythms; the ironic clashing of those rhythms with the grim description; the “rags of snow” metaphor spilling significance over the passage; the Biblical idiom in “hewers of wood and drawers of waters” shifting the register of the discourse; the ambiguous referent lurking in the “He” of the penultimate sentence—all force the reader to recognize that this language is aesthetically controlled to the level of the syllable.

Although this kind of writing can be described as “poetic,” the more precise designation is “figurative.” The prose of Blood Meridian is figured not only by the comparative tropes with which the text teems but also and especially by its manipulation of all linguistic conventions—of grammar, punctuation, and syntax—in “an intended deviation from ordinary usage” (Quinn 6). Nearly every sentence in the novel is figured, so that in such an artificial context the few unfigured sentences also seem a “deviation from ordinary usage.” From first to last, this is a carefully wrought prose whose end is as affective as it is discursive.

This figurative language produces two different effects. The first is local, in the manner I sketched above. Specific effects vary as the prose shifts from the apparently objective to the suggestively impressionistic to the richly metaphorical to the thematically and aesthetically stunning: “… at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them” (44-5). Yet there is nothing of the stylistically profligate here. Carefully controlled, the language carefully controls the reader's response, producing contextually appropriate effects ranging from the horrific to the humorous (oddly, few critics mention how funny the book often is).

Despite the affective richness of individual passages, it is the more general effect of this prose that is the more significant, for in its utter and unrelieved literariness it continuously calls attention to itself qua language. Every sentence reminds the reader that it is not a transparent transcription or objective rendering of events occurring in a fictional world so much as it is a subjective commentary, however oblique or problematical, on those events and that world. That is, always in Blood Meridian the medium distorts or refracts the material. The effect is not that of a metafictional discourse that foregrounds its own artifice, or of a postmodern language that ludically takes itself as subject: this prose focuses sharply, often eidetically, on the world it creates. But it also attempts to evaluate that world—it not only mediates but also meditates. And because meditation presumes a meditator, it forces the reader into an awareness of McCarthy's most impressive artistic creation: the narrator.

Implicit everywhere in the language, the narrator sometimes explicitly announces his presence—in locutions like the “in truth” of the first paragraph, in tense shifts, in prolepses like “for what would prove forever” (242) and analepses like “as told” (86), and in the rare direct address: “pursuing as all travelers must inversions without end upon other men's journeys” (121). Few as they are—or more precisely, because they are so few—these intrusions jolt the reader into the recognition that the narrator is not just recounting past events but also brooding over them, uncertainly searching for meaning within them.

The narrator's language also directs the reader's attention to the quality of the consciousness it articulates. The novel is narrated by a distinct personality, an intellect exhibiting its own interests and obsessions, a psyche its own anxieties and uncertainties. This personality can be detected in the recurring events and images the narrator nearly compulsively elects to portray; in the occasional admission of uncertainty in “perhaps” and the groping after coherence in “as if” constructions; and in the rhetorical, but meaningful, questions: “Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what?” (111).

The reader's sense of a consciousness in search of meaning is intensified by the narrator's curious epistemology, which is largely self-limited to the surface of things. And while capable of character analysis, the narrator concentrates on the surface of humans as well. Rarely does he enter the mind of a character; only once does he psychologize. Instead he focuses on appearance and language and action, which serves to transform the characters into things as well. Combined with the panoramic perspective from which he often narrates, this method produces a naturalist reduction of the human inhabitants of this fictional world. The aggregate effect is disturbingly compelling, as if the narrator were an atemporal observer of a world gone horribly wrong, a world populated by a species grown so alien to him that their inner existence he cannot assess and so does not access.

Finally, awareness of the ubiquitous narrative consciousness in Blood Meridian forces upon the reader the further awareness that this consciousness literally informs the text, arranges past events into a coherent whole. Because the narrator knows the complete story at all stages of its telling, narrative logic insists that he is responsible for the idiosyncrasies of that telling, for its shifts in focus and perspective, fluctuations in tone, gaps and details, scenes and synopses.³ Thus the narrator shapes the story that he tells, organizes his narration in such a way that its form contributes to, indeed nearly becomes, its meaning.

II

To many of its reviewers and critics Blood Meridian seems essentially shapeless, a loosely picaresque novel that tracks sometimes the wanderings of an unnamed “kid” and sometimes the maraudings of a band of American scalphunters; at best the action appears circular, beginning and ending—more or less—in an outhouse. However, a careful perusal of the text reveals a narrative structure so complex and sophisticated that I can here describe it and its effects only in the broadest of terms.

Blood Meridian consists of twenty-three chapters, but these constitute three separate sections. The first six chapters follow the kid from his flight from his Tennessee home to his incarceration in Chihuahua City. Chapters Seven through Nineteen attend the campaigns of the scalphunters, concluding with their massacre at Yuma Crossing. The final four chapters again follow the kid, from Yuma Crossing to his death twenty-nine years later at the hands of Judge Holden. These sections make up a dramatic structure that some readers perceive or intuit: the action proceeds from exposition in the first section through complication and climax in the second to denouement in the third.

Moreover, the two smaller sections are similarly structured, so that they function as dramatic frames for the larger, middle section. In the first, the initial three chapters introduce the circumstances that lead to the kid's presence at the “death hilarious” (78) destruction of the filibusters by the Comanche in Chapter Four. (This chapter is itself an almost perfectly modulated piece of fiction.) This section concludes with the kid's arrival in Chihuahua City, his second meeting with Toadvine and his second sighting of Holden. The last section also has three parts: first the kid's escape from Yuma Crossing and then from Holden, then his climactic attempt at confession in San Diego, followed by the denouement, much of which is a synoptic account of the kid's life for the next twenty-nine years, which leads to his final and fatal meeting with the Judge.⁴

While these smaller structures create both dramatic and aesthetic effects, they also present, in different contexts and with altered emphases, the events and issues thematically central to the novel. As an action, the first section conforms to the comic pattern, concluding as the kid reestablishes a relationship with Toadvine and joins the American mercenaries; in the last section the pattern of action is less clearly delineated, although the kid's eventual isolation casts over it a tragic light. The purpose of these smaller dramatic structures is to present many of the novel's central themes from subtly shifting perspectives; however, the result is not clarification but complication: as commentary on the story of the scalphunters, they deepen the human mystery at its heart.

In addition to parallel dramatic structures, the narrator also constructs an overarching thematic form. In the long second section, the kid ceases to function as the focal character and in fact often disappears; this section, dramatically complete in itself, also stands separate from the third, which again follows the kid. Thus the two smaller sections, presenting before and after views of the kid, frame the larger middle section, providing thematically the same kind of repetition-with-variation commentary that they provide dramatically, and to the same effect.

Far from formless, then, McCarthy's novel is an intricate narrative structure. But the aesthetic and thematic purpose of this elaborate construction become clear only when we see that the novel's long second section, the narrator's troubled and troubling account of the scalphunters, presents the central action of the novel. This section too is built of dramatic and thematic patterns that intersect and imbricate and so help to produce the text's power. Moreover, unlike those in the first and third sections, the pattern of action here constitutes a consciously constructed, and tragic, plot.

III

Most readers agree with Donoghue's observation that McCarthy “appears to have little interest in plot. … His novels are episodic … not discriminated, adjudicated for significance or pointed toward a climax, a disclosure, or a resolution” (5).⁵ This would seem the case in Blood Meridian, which appears to have no protagonist, no character from whom the action arises or around whom it coalesces. The kid, as I noted, often vanishes in the central section. And those critics who would have Holden the protagonist ignore his general lack of agency in the narrated events. In fact, neither the kid nor the Judge can serve as protagonist, for the historical events that Blood Meridian fictionalizes concern a band of American mercenaries, and the leader of the historical scalphunters and the protagonist of the novel's central, fictional, tragic plot is Captain John Joel Glanton.⁶

To speak of a tragic plot is, of course, only to identify an action involving a character about whose fate the reader is made to care, a fate which the pattern of that action makes clear can only be one of alienation, isolation, or death.⁷ That Blood Meridian meets the first requirement—makes the reader care for Glanton's fate—may seem dubious, given the moral repugnance of the Captain's actions. But the narrator goes to some lengths to ensure that Glanton, despite the evil of his actions and enterprise, becomes the object of our concern.

Other than Holden, Toadvine, Tobin, and the kid, the scalphunters are merely names, men identified so that the narrator can later record their deaths. Yet he also subtly reveals—through a remark here, a gesture there—that under the “scapulars or necklaces of dried and blackened human ears” (78) there remains a human essence in these anomic men, so that, knowing they ride to their doom, the reader comes to care about them and their fate.

This is particularly the case with Glanton. Significantly, he is the one character for whom the narrator provides psychological information, usually in brief assessments such as “he shook his head at the wonderful invention of folly in its guises and forms” (117). But in the only exposition of character in the novel, the narrator tells us:

He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look on the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.

(243)

How Glanton has come to this state the reader never learns, but the narrator makes it clear that he was not always so. When the band crosses into Texas, the reader remains behind with the Captain as the narrator invokes another time, world, and man: “He rode out alone on the desert. … [T]o the east were the wife and child that he would not see again. His shadow grew long before him on the banded wash of sand. He would not follow” (172).

With his family lost beyond recovery, Glanton now has human ties only to his paramilitary band. In the sociopolitical arena, he is at once the contracted agent of the Chihuahuan government, which offers a bounty for Apache scalps; the instrument of the covert political policies of the United States government, which provides funds for the band's arms; and the champion of the Mexican citizens in their war against the ravaging Apache. In his first appearance in the text, Glanton is at his apogee in each of these relations. But what the narrator dramatizes through the story of the scalphunters is Glanton's willful severing of all social ties, his betrayal of all political agreements, and his destruction of all human covenants.⁸

Like all the novel's structures, this central plot results from the narrator's imposition of form on his material. Organizing his narration around the scalphunters's departure from and arrival at cities, he also constructs this plot through depiction of a series of seemingly minor events that, if not discursively “adjudicated for significance,” nevertheless clearly points toward “a resolution.”

The action begins as Glanton leads his troop out of Chihuahua City, “the lovely darkskinned girls throwing flowers from the windows and some blowing kisses and small boys running alongside and old men waving their hats and crying out huzzahs …” (80). But any legitimacy attending the group as soldiers in war quickly vanishes, for the first scalping victim is an aged woman “slain in her blood without remedy” (98). On this murder-for-profit the narrator comments obliquely by describing first the other mercenaries—“They were stood some looking down at the old woman, some already seeing to their mounts or their equipage. Only the recruits were watching Glanton” (98)—and then Glanton: “[he] took the dripping trophy from McGill and turned it in the sun the way a man might qualify the pelt of an animal” (99).

Other instances—Glanton's acceptance without comment of the murder of the squatter boy and the wounded Apache child; his killing of and the scalping of one of his own men, “A Mexican, solitary of his race in that company” (98); the slaughter of both friendly Indians and Mexican peasants—indicate the extent of the Captain's rejection of social and ethical strictures; they also confirm the narrator's sense of the ultimate inexplicability of Glanton and the troop subject to his will: “in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds” (152).

The first campaign concludes as the band returns to the city and a hero's welcome, bearing “on poles the desiccated heads of the enemy through that fantasy of music and flowers” (165). But after the scalphunters's three-week debauch, on the city walls appear scrawled messages: “Mejor los indios” [Better the Indians] (171). Of the mercenaries's departure the narrator says only, “On the fifteenth of August they rode out” (171).

This pattern repeats itself throughout the action, as in the field Glanton leads his men into slaughter more and more wanton. Of the band's next return to the city the narrator says nothing; of their departure he notes, “They rode out of town under escort two days later” (176). Finally, “they entered the city haggard and filthy and reeking with the blood of the citizenry for whose protection they had contracted. … Within a week of their quitting the city there would be a price of eight thousand pesos posted for Glanton's head” (185). At Ures it is much the same: the scalphunters contract “for the furnishing of Apache scalps” (204); they massacre a pueblo and are soon pursued by a troop of Sonoran cavalry. In Tucson and San Diego, a similar pattern informs their actions, which end at last at Yuma Crossing.

Through all of this, narrator and reader listen to Holden's expatiations on various subjects, attend to Tobin's warnings to the kid about “that sooty-souled rascal” (124), follow the kid during his separation from the band, and observe the unfolding of the inevitable fate of the scalphunters. But largely narrator and reader watch Glanton, as he plots strategy and gives orders, rides harmless muleteers off a cliff, leads the slaughter of Mexican soldiers, and greets the returning kid: “Glanton's eyes in their dark sockets were burning centroids of murder” (218). Yet Glanton is essentially an isolated, solitary figure whose silent ruminations the narrator reports only once: “All about him his men were sleeping but much was changed. So many gone, defected or dead. The Delawares all slain” (243). As he returns from San Diego, alone, “the horseman rode on all contrary to the tide of refugees like some storied hero toward what beast of war or plague or famine with what set to his relentless jaw” (272). Four pages later he spits defiance as an ax-wielding Yuma chief “splits the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple” (276). Reader and narrator watch the tragic pattern unfold, trying to account for the inhuman actions of a being they recognize as human, trying to understand an evil for which the word evil has become but the denomination of a human mystery. Tobin, who would understand, can only conclude, “Glanton I always knew was mad” (127). But reader and narrator, for whom that explanation is inadequate, continue to wonder, to drift on “a conjectural wind.”

IV

My sketch of Blood Meridian's framed tragic plot should not suggest that the novel's structural elements alone produce its profound effect. Indeed, my argument is that the power of the novel results from McCarthy's manifold but integrated artistry. While the dramatic and thematic patterns create specific effects, they function more powerfully in relation to each other and to other textual patterns, relations determined by the narrative principle governing the entire text—repetition-with-variation.

This principle regulates all elements in the novel, but perhaps most obviously those linguistic and imagistic. The reader of Blood Meridian quickly perceives that some words and phrases appear with an almost rhythmic regularity throughout the text. Some—“fate” and “destiny,” for example—indicate concepts that relate to thematic issues; others denote acts or entities that iteratively evoke emotions or attitudes. But all are carefully modulated to achieve a significance at once aesthetic and thematic, to create a powerfully disturbing fictional world.

Shortly after the novel opens, for example, the reader encounters a one-sentence but not especially noteworthy paragraph: “They went on” (11). A few pages later the same words recur, to be shortly followed by a variation, “He went on” (22). Then in Chapter Four appears the form that becomes standard, “They rode on” (44). The recurrence of the phrase or a variation increases in frequency as the filibusters move toward to their “death hilarious,” then decreases as the kid nears Chihuahua. In the novel's second section it occurs nearly forty times, in the third more than a dozen.⁹ None of these is of particular dramatic or thematic significance, yet at some point—perhaps the opening paragraph of Chapter Nine, which begins with and repeats four times “They rode on” (136)—the reader becomes consciously aware of the locution and of its iterative pattern.

This pattern contributes to the reader's sense that the text is a whole, an interrelated action, and that the narrator is not just telling a story but is constructing it through a careful organization of its elements. Thematically, it reinforces the sense of an “inexorable onwardness” often produced by the prose. And the locution soon clusters with others, gathers ideas, values, and attitudes that constitute a central theme of the novel.

To take but one example, in “They rode on” the verb has no specific object. Neither it nor its variations designate a destination. The scalphunters sometimes ride “from” but never “to.” The phrase itself suggests that a destination is irrelevant, that the only activity of consequence is riding “on.” So Glanton and his men seem to ride “to” nowhere, to exist in a present in which the past is meaningless and the future imponderable.¹⁰ Similarly, in several scenes a wounded man urges his companion to “go on,” but the exhortations specify no objective other than survival. And at several points someone asks the unrhetorical but usually unanswered question, “Donde va?” All this, in its ineffable ambiguity, comes to conclusion in the final sentence of the novel's epilogue: “Then they all move on again” (337).

The novel's dominant images—of fire and rock, sun and stars, shadows and smoke, among others—function in much the same way, helping to bind the narrative into a whole. But they too, as they appear in different contexts, become the loci of multiple meanings. Even more powerfully than words or phrases, these images ramify, entwining disparate textual elements into thematic bundles of meaning:

They rode in a narrow enfilade along a train strewn with the dry round turds of goats and they rode with their faces averted from the rock wall and the bakeoven air which it rebated, the slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them and continuing autonomous across the naked rock without sun or man or god.

(139)

This passage, in both its “shadow” image and narrator's comment, not only “means” in itself but also collects other meanings, some produced by earlier shadow images, some by earlier narratorial glosses. Moreover, the image pulls in the many doubling images in the text—for example, those of an “inverted mirage”; both appeared together in the narrator's description of attacking Apaches, first “black in the sun … like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real,” and then “howling antiwarriors pendant from their mounts immense and chimeric,” a description the narrator glosses: “[their] high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below” (109). That is, as these images collect manifold meanings, they come to function as symbols, to produce the powerful effects of that artistic association of ideas, values, and attitudes at which literary language can only point and before which expository language must stand still and mute.

V

My concern in this essay has been to offer a brief discussion of Blood Meridian as a work of narrative art, to establish the radical centrality of the narrative voice and consciousness, to demonstrate the care with which the narrator frames the story he recounts as a tragic action, and to suggest the aesthetic and thematic effects of McCarthy's use of repetition of language, image, and symbol. While I have examined the novel's form, I have not offered a thematic reading. Indeed, the novel vigorously resists thematizing: it is the sort of modernist/symbolist text designed to be not read but experienced; insofar as the verb “to mean” applies to Blood Meridian it must be intransitive.¹¹

Nevertheless, I acknowledge what many will already have observed—I have been “reading” Blood Meridian throughout this essay. I could not do otherwise, for form in literature cannot be separated from its material. And my analysis of the formal characteristics of the novel perforce suggests the nature of my reading experience: the Blood Meridian that I experience is profoundly religious.

By religious I of course mean doctrinal no more than I mean moral, and I could almost—but not quite—substitute the word existential. I mean, first of all, that the novel presents, through its every word, phrase, and sentence, its every pattern and structure, a vision of human existence reduced to a confrontation with a fundamental mystery for which religion has traditionally provided answers: human evil.¹² This, ultimately, is the subject of the narrator's obsessive and unsuccessful inquiry.

Beyond that, this inquiry take place in a physical and thematic landscape charged with religious nuance, allusion, and language. The western wastelands wandered by the scalphunters transmogrify through the narrator's description into an eldritch world of smoke and fire and darkness, a land at once ancient beyond reckoning and so new it has yet to cool and harden. The world the narrator envisions is elemental, in both its dominance by the elements—earth, wind, water, fire—and its reduction of human existence to an elemental condition out of which arise the most fundamental, and fundamentally religious, questions.

More concretely, the texture of the novel is interwoven with religious—primarily Christian—allusions, images, and language. Everywhere the reader finds desecrated churches and obscene crosses, meets crazed eremites and suffering pilgrims and bloody penitentes; the scalphunters ride off from the headless body of White John Jackson “sitting like a murdered anchorite discalced in ashes and sark” (107); Holden, who argues that “War is God,” becomes at Yuma Crossing an archimandrite. The novel is punctuated by the cries of human beings calling on their God or gods for deliverance, and everywhere the narrator himself invokes a God whose existence is as problematical as the men and action of the story he tells are mystifying.

I am not arguing that this is a Christian book, only that the narrator formulates his inquiry in terms of the historically dominant religion of Western culture. In any case, nowhere does the novel answer the questions it raises, nowhere does it explain the mystery of evil in human hearts. (The epilogue, which some would have a cryptic commentary or gnomic gloss on the action, is simply a parable reexpressing the themes announced in the novel's three epigraphs.) Nor should it provide these answers or explanations. Blood Meridian is not an expository or argumentative discourse. It is an intricately composed and artfully rendered narrative that produces in us the recognition effected by all powerful literature—that the story we read is, in a fundamental sense, our own story; that as we follow the actions of Glanton and Holden and the kid and the scalphunters we follow, in the same fundamental sense, our own actions; and that as we watch the narrator struggle to come to terms with these men, with both their evil and their humanity, we watch ourselves.

A number of people helped me with this essay in the various stages of its composition; I would especially like to thank Robert Harvey, Harold Storsve, William Belli, Vonnie Rosendahl, and, as always and in particular, Robert Merrill.

Notes

1. Most criticism of McCarthy's fiction has appeared in journals dedicated to the study of southern literature, the thematic confines of which severely restrict, if they do not quite preclude, meaningful discussion of the “western” novels. During a recent amble through the bookstore at UC-Berkeley, however, I counted seven courses in which a McCarthy novel, usually Blood Meridian, was being taught—surely a sign of “post,” “neo,” or “cultural” articles in the works. As for canonization, Harold Bloom has already held a ceremony, citing Blood Meridian as “a scary, real nightmare of a book, which rings absolutely truthfully about the massacres constantly going on of Indians and everyone else on the American frontier in the 19th century.”

2. As I hope that what follows will make clear, it is not pedantic quibbling to insist that the prose Donoghue describes is not McCarthy's but rather the narrator's.

3. These kinds of narrative decisions are often attributed to the implied author. While I cannot here venture deeply into narratorial waters stirred to murk by the many students, admirers, and epigones of Wayne Booth, I would suggest that the concept of an implied (inferred) author has significant relevance to some kinds of texts but not to others, and especially not to those like, for example, The Great Gatsby, in which the reader witnesses the narrator creating the narrative. Such is also the case with Blood Meridian.

4. Some readers may see a different dramatic structure in the final section. However, my argument rests not on the proposition that the section is tripartite but simply on the fact that it has a meaningful dramatic structure.

5. Donoghue is of course describing a particular kind of plot.

6. That the novel is based on historical events, as the dust jacket informs us, does not mean that it is an historical novel. Thus exercises in source identification, while of some interest in themselves, say little about McCarthy's novel. The most comprehensive of these treatments is John Emil Sepich's.

7. My definition, as well as certain aspects of my discussion of structure and effect, derives from the work of Northrop Frye and of the “Chicago Critics,” most notably R. S. Crane and Sheldon Sacks.

8. Several critics assert that in his murderous monomania Glanton suggests Ahab, but the similarity is largely superficial. Psychologically, Glanton exists in the thrall of not egoism but solipsism. And as Shaviro, 115, points out, Ahab is the protagonist of a Romantic tragedy; Glanton, while “he lays claim to the absurd existential nobility of the tragic hero,” is essentially an anti-hero.

9. This sort of count depends on the reader's sense of what constitutes a variation and what is in fact a separate locution. If anything, I have undercounted.

10. A similar point is made by Vereen M. Bell.

11. Critics will of course find in the text whatever their critical theory either allows or demands. Thus we might anticipate readings of Blood Meridian that find it an indictment of most elements of Western or European or Euroamerican culture. And we can easily imagine a psychological reading that, taking off from the “child is father to the man” allusion of the first page, reads the novel in terms of the father-son motif present in Holden's account of the Anasazi, his subsequent story, and his curious relationship with the kid, noting that in the final pages of the book the “kid” becomes the “man” shortly before he kills a fifteen-year-old boy who seems much like his fourteen-year-old self.

12. Most commentators on the novel note its concern with the problem of evil, but not all find it central. And most direct their discussions away from its mystery, apparently agreeing with Holden that “The only mystery is that there is no mystery,” as they attempt to account for the evil by taking the Judge's post-Enlightenment, proto-Nietzschean notions as a “genuine metaphysic” (Bell 120).

Works Cited

Bell, Vereen M. The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988, 118.

Bloom, Harold. “Harold Bloom Chats About American Authors,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 September 1994, A 11, A 24-25.

Donoghue, Denis. “Dream Work,” New York Times Review of Books, 24 June 1993, 6-10.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage International, 1992. All citations are from this edition.

Moran, Terence. “The Wired West,” The New Republic, 5 May 1985, 37-38.

Quinn, Arthur. Figures of Speech. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith Inc., 1982.

Sepich, John Emil. “‘What kind of indians was them?’: Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian,” Southern Quarterly 30 (Summer 1992), 93-109.

Shaviro, Steven. “The Very Life of Darkness: A Reading of Blood Meridian,” Southern Quarterly, 30 (Summer 1992), 111-121.