"In a time before nomenclature was and each was all": BloodMeridian's Neomythic West and the Heterotopian Zone

David Holmberg

Western American Literature, Volume 44, Number 2, Summer2009, pp. 140-156 (Article)

Published by The Western Literature AssociationDOI: 10.1353/wal.0.0026

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Nasario Lopez. DEATH IN HER CART/LA MUERTE EN SU CARRETA. Ca. 1840–1875. Cottonwood, gesso, leather. 51" h x 24" w x32" d (with tongue of cart: 36 ½"d). Courtesy of the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. Gift of Alice Bemis Taylor. TM 521.

Western American Literature 44.2 (Summer 2009): 141--56

“in a time before nomenclature was and each was all”:

Blood Meridian ’s Neomythic West and the Heterotopian Zone

David Holmberg

Midway through Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West (1985), the men of Glanton’s gang—depicted as pre-historic beasts with a mandate for blood—wander an uncharted land of monsters that seems little reminiscent of any previously seen incarnations of the American West:

They rode like men invested with a purpose whose origins were antecedent to them, like blood legatees of an order both imperative and remote. For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and 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 similes McCarthy employs hover around a shockingly stark neomythic vision of the West, and it is through this relentless use of simile that he brings into being another world in conjunction as well as at odds with the assumed stage of western reality; he likes a mythic world into existence in the first half of the novel until that neomythic world is reality.

Blood Meridian exists in a world, or worlds, apart from any we know, present or past, a world(s) we envision as emerging from the dust of a recent charge of revisionist histories. One of these worlds creates a new twentieth-century history for an old nineteenth-century world in which the unimaginable violence of our own time might be reconciled with that of the past; another world or zone of Blood Meridian acts as a retelling of western expansion under the ostensibly swaying flag of a colonial manifest destiny. Maybe McCarthy’s novel is all of that. Then again, Blood Meridian seems to have nothing to do with actively righting the wrongs of history, or even passively situating history’s denial of the violent settling of the West. McCarthy’s novel interprets more readily as myth than any kind of

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Western, postmodern or otherwise. This specific line of inquiry, though, is perhaps less important than the general question it seeks to raise: what is Blood Meridian really doing, structurally and thematically? The novel certainly appears to be doing quite a lot, even if it remains unclear what it is the text ultimately accomplishes. McCarthy’s novel is history, but it is also myth, narratively and stylistically, although the myth he creates runs concurrent and, importantly, through the realities of a revisionist West.1 Beyond the violence, the most troubling and unsettling feature of Blood Meridian is the creation of these multiple fictional zones, reproduced simultaneously and unbearably; McCarthy’s text creates a postmodern heterotopian zone in which multiple disparate spaces come to exist impos-sibly together, leaving him to dispatch a gang of historical figures into a neomythic, postapocalyptic, and postmodern unreality that is and is not Texas, that is and is not the West.2

Heterotopia

As Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce point out in their introduction to Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (1993), because of the opacity of Blood Meridian, multiple, divergent critical readings have emerged to try and deal with the text, with primary readings focusing on it as one of the following three types of novel: as a “historical novel, as a philosophical or theologi-cal treatise, or as a major achievement of postmodern fiction” (10). I agree with their implicit suggestion that, to a large extent, these are three of the primary methods of reading the novel (I would also add mythological), but I take issue with their “ors”: as I will be arguing—and what I think McCarthy scholarship generally tends to dismiss—Blood Meridian is not a case of historical or mythological or theological or postmodern, but his-torical and mythological and theological and postmodern. That these four could exist simultaneously is obviously problematic, but it is also more exegetically revealing to allow for their coexistence.

In other words, if McCarthy’s novel is history, then it is also myth, but if it is either history or myth, it is neither as well; his text exists, and must exist to be relevant, in the problematical postmodernist realm of the heterotopian zone. This concept of the heterotopia as a zone of simulta-neity of worlds, time, and thought was introduced by Michel Foucault in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970). He utilizes the term as a method of conceptualizing a space between the microcosmic conventions of self-imposed human culture and the macrocosmic univer-sal regulations of scientific law, as it creates an intermediary zone where these codes cannot be, but also cannot not be, directly applied. These are

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disturbing “because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle com-mon names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syn-tax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’” (xviii). Foucault carefully labels this other zone of exis-tence a heterotopia, not a distopia; whereas a distopia is an inverted utopia in which right and wrong switch roles and morality is flipped, the hetero-topia is an affront to rational thought as it breaks down post-Descartian notions of thinking into something like “I think therefore I am thinking I am thinking what I am thinking and what I am not thinking.”

In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale uses the concept of the hetero-topia not, as Foucault does, to trace the history of intellectual thought, but instead as a way of conceptualizing a new space and new theoretical possibilities being constructed in postmodernist literature, with space “less constructed than deconstructed by the text, or rather constructed and deconstructed at the same time. Postmodernist fiction draws upon a number of strategies for constructing/deconstructing space, among them juxtaposition, interpolation, superimposition, and misattribution” (45). McHale describes the heterotopia as a literary zone in which the human sense of the universe or existence has its absolute antithesis of meaning incorpo-rated into its being, of the utopia not having a distopia, but something far more disturbing, although much more integral, to its basic being. McHale makes the analogy between the postmodernist heterotopia and the Land of Oz, a utopia that must be located in Kansas, despite of course the impos-sibility of this being true. In McCarthy’s novel, the men of Glanton’s gang ride, ostensibly, through the West, although “conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and 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 conjec-tural winds” (152); like Oz in The Wizard of Oz, this zone is two places at once, becoming a third: a superimposition of worlds, utopias, or distopias or something between, becoming the heterotopia.

American Mythologies and National Histories

American mythology in particular occupies a difficult place in cultural history because, in large part, it must be entirely retroactively defined; the settlement of the North American continent occurred rapidly and unsen-timentally, engaging more in the erasure of culture than the creation of it, and only retrospectively can the mythic history of the West be imagined

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and told. In Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (1973), Richard Slotkin reconstructs an American mythology out of the frontier legends of the past, and by doing so is able to begin establishing a framework of mythological conceits.3 Slotkin explains the basic usage of mythology as it pertains to historical events and the ways in which colonists relied on mythological frameworks of good versus evil to explain their relationships with the Native Americans. Slotkin’s reduc-tion of mythology to a basic theory of a contextualized human experience is compelling because it provides a reason for the production of mythology and thereby explains the US need to mythologize the past. Slotkin sees the myth as an attempt to unify colonial experience and cohere the national narrative, ostensibly under the banner of manifest destiny.

One of the texts that has participated most significantly in the simulta-neous consecration of national history as well as the founding of a national US mythology—both of particular relevance to Blood Meridian—is Frederick Jackson Turner’s speech “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). Taken as a historical documentation of mythologized colonial expansion, Turner’s text is acutely relevant, primarily because it ultimately speaks not just of history, but of the conscious creation of a US mythology. Until the mid-twentieth century, Turner’s theory about history of the formation of the United States and the US psyche through the colonization of the North American continent was considered an accurate and insightful examination of historical events; from a twenty-first-century perspective, his theory is little more than a rationalization for colonial genocide, and it is this colonial genocide that seems to preoccupy Glanton’s gang. As multiple critics note, the American West of Blood Meridian is in many ways Turner’s West made reality, although of course that reality has to contend with the presence of the Native Americans and other indig-enous cultures.4

In the context of McCarthy’s text, this reconciliation of myth and experience will prove impossible, although the potentiality of such a reunion must remain; just as the world of prelapsarian Christianity nec-essarily influences the understanding of a world after the fall of man, so must the mythic West inform understandings of the historical West. As numerous critics have noted, and indeed as various editions of the book itself state on the dust jacket or back cover, the novel is rooted (loosely) in some form of historical reality; many of the events and characters have real historical counterparts.5 While the historical aspect of the novel is of concern to me, more pertinent to my line of inquiry are the ways in which the national myths of the West have informed our understanding of that historical reality. Patrick Shaw’s The Modern American Novel of

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Violence (2000) suggests that “by disguising his brutes as historic personae, [McCarthy] strengthens their credibility and thereby makes it more dif-ficult for us to dismiss them as the mad illusions of an eccentric myth-maker. To reject Glanton, Holden, ex-priest Tobin, Toadvine, the kid, and the other scalphunters as mere fictional aberrations is to risk dismissing American history” (140). Shaw’s emphasis on the historicity of the novel is crucial because it does seem to justify the otherwise seemingly excessive violence of the text; as a meditation on violence, the novel explores the moral and physical costs of colonization or, more accurately, genocide. Interpreting the novel as revisionist history is certainly warranted, and a “morally” valuable lesson might be acquired through a consideration of the way that the West was actually settled. Viewing the text itself as his-tory provides a viable complementary interpretive possibility, as the text’s historical reinterpretation of the settlement of the West becomes an alter-native document in the history of American self-interpretation; in a sense, the text is history, as it becomes a part of our national self-consciousness in an attempt to understand the national mythology.

Like so many novels of the twentieth century, Blood Meridian is resis-tant to any firm categorizations or critical excavations; the text seems to demand the examination of historical realities behind what might be considered McCarthy’s re-envisioning of the West as a site of violent depravity. The novel centers on the nameless kid, who “can neither read

Albert Lawrence Wilson. OLD JAIL, HARTLEY TEX. 1915. Postcard. Courtesy of Texas A&M University Press.

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nor write and in [whom] broods already a taste for mindless violence,” and follows his exploits with a group of men whose unspoken task, presum-ably, is to settle the West, which translates in modern terms to a gang of mercenary scalphunters out for random—but preferably nonwhite—blood (3). It is said of the kid that “all history [is] present in that visage, the child the father of the man,” and this might be read as a metacritical commen-tary on the novel itself; the kid is American and world history, in all its thoughtlessness and its brutality, just as the novel is an exploration of that often misinterpreted history of the West (3). The novel, as the child of history, is also the father of a new, more critically accurate understanding of the western ethos. With the concurrent employment of manifest des-tiny as a justification for this settlement, the struggle to settle the West is transformed into a Christian crusade against a heathen race. McCarthy’s novel works to deflate the now obvious historical fraudulence of a heroic settlement of the West, but doing so means participating in both the his-tory and the myth, a complicated, overlapping and simultaneous project.

Narrative and Stylistic Features of Blood Meridian ’s Heterotopian Zone

Although the narrative of McCarthy’s novel follows the actual historical account of Glanton’s scalphunting expeditions, the language and the-matic overtones dwell in the world of mythology; this leaves the two concurrent projects continually working to undermine each other, as the traditional historicity and mythic characteristics vie for narrative domi-nance. Although the central story of Blood Meridian is framed by history, a distorted summation of the overall narrative of Blood Meridian, when read as a myth, looks something like this: a young boy leaves a failed family to pursue adventures and knowledge; in the process, he meets unlikely characters—mainly rogues, hermits, and holy fools—as he undergoes the transformation from innocence to experience. This might be any num-ber of legends and stories, from the Arthurian tales of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (ca. 1195–1225) to the social commentary of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).6 Even in a story such as Blood Meridian, which appears to stress violence above all else, the novel does follow a mythic structure, at least enough to be able to subvert that dimension; the novel enters into the realm of the neomythic, and at times even the neobiblical, but often only as a means of unraveling or destroy-ing those original myths. This feeds directly back into the national myths, as defined by Turner’s thesis; as a myth, Blood Meridian operates as a sort of hybridism of traditional and national mythologies, although even as

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it acts as a bridge between these divergent myths, the novel attempts to deconstruct their meanings.

Numerous narrative events occur in the novel that refer to—or at least point toward—other myths, legends, dramas, histories, and even the Bible, and while most of these allusions are subverted, destroyed, reinforced, or otherwise mangled, all seem to have been stripped of their intended invested meaning. Two of these, in particular, are representa-tive of this characteristic in McCarthy’s text and provide insight into how the narrative collapses all worlds it encounters: the kid’s encounter with the burning bush and the role of the idiot. In a novel that appears as insistently allegorical as Blood Meridian, there is an expectation that, as Steven Shaviro suggests, the text “unveil a mystery” even though the sym-bolic nature of the text can at best only be assumed by the reader (147).7 McCarthy gives no indication that his novel serves any didactic function despite the intensity and frequency of the violence at least demanding that the reader seek a redemptive value in reading the work. When the kid becomes separated from the scalphunting gang, he is offered a moment of potential redemption, of a potential escape from the life he has, perhaps, unwittingly chosen: “It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out. … When the sun rose he was asleep under the smoldering skeleton of a blackened scrog” (215). This is a “heraldic tree” that the kid-as-pilgrim encounters, and traditionally this type of symbol is interpreted as a message from God; the Lord speaks to Moses out of the burning bush and tells him to deliver the chosen people from Egypt. While the burning tree in Blood Meridian seems to clearly be referencing the burning bush of Exodus, there is no voice of Yahweh calling the kid, as it called Moses, to any task; in the morning, the tree has simply stopped burning. The only possible redemptive reading is that the burning tree offers warmth, although this is a purely physical salvation, without any spiritual correspondence. McCarthy’s scene sets up the burning tree as a heraldic symbol, but whether the kid is incapable of interpreting that symbol or whether the symbol itself is deficient remains unclear; in either event, no spiritual salvation occurs, and again the kid is left to wander without morals and without direction.

In a similar encounter that suggests a symbolically meaningful epi-sode, the kid and company discover the so-called idiot. Classically, the character of the idiot represents a type of holy fool who, although masked behind a veil of idiocy, is in actuality a source of intelligence, sanctity, or a combination of the two. In Blood Meridian, “the idiot was small and mis-

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shapen and his face was smeared with feces and he sat peering at them with dull hostility silently chewing a turd” (233). It should be noted that McCarthy approaches many of his subversive commentaries with a great deal of humor. He does not have to describe his holy fool “chewing a turd”; it is a gratuitous addition, but a funny one, and it serves to make any reading of the fool as “holy” extremely difficult. The figure of the fool descends from a long line of intriguing and meaningful fools who, despite a seeming obliviousness to the exterior world, maintain a moral or social awareness that makes them somehow more intelligent than the characters who surround them. However, it is the fool of King Lear who seems to have stepped straight from the lines of Shakespeare into the pages of McCarthy; McHale describes this type of possibility, in the heterotopian zone, of literary characters “transmigrating” between texts.8

McCarthy’s fool might be more debase and serving less of a narrative purpose than Shakespeare’s, but this in part leads to the strength of his “transworld identity” (McHale, Postmodernist Fiction 57); somehow Lear’s fool wandered into the pages of Blood Meridian and latched on to the clos-est character to King Lear: the judge. But unlike in Shakespeare’s play, the fool’s companion cannot be saved; King Lear must be shown the mistakes of an egotistical reign, but the judge is at best a calculated murderer, at

Coreen Mary Spellman. CEMETERY. Ca. 1946. Lithograph. 8 3/4" x 12 3/8". Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art. Gift of Helen, Mick, and Thomas Spellman.

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worst the devil. Because of his role as companion to the judge, the idiot establishes/reestablishes the relationship as defined by Shakespeare; the judge becomes a type of Lear in order for the idiot to assume his role as the fool: “[the judge] too had lost his hat and he rode with a woven wreath of desert scrub about his head like some egregious saltland bard” (219); so, just like King Lear with his Christ complexes, the judge dons the cloak of Shakespeare’s king, thereby accepting and validating his companion’s existence in the novel. But without even the slightest moral purpose, the idiot has little to do but eat his own feces and shamble off with the quasi-devil into the sunsets of the neomythic West.

Along with these narrative conflicts between biblical drama and Shake-spearean tragedy, between fiction and fiction, and, as discussed earlier, between history and myth, the language of the landscape in Blood Meridian enters into a complicated dialogue between the real and the neomythic, a discourse that pertains directly to the creation of the text’s heterotopia. McHale describes this act of two theoretical spaces, in McCarthy’s case the real and the neomythic, as a function of the superimposition: “here two familiar spaces are placed one on top of the other, as in a photographic double-exposure, creating through their tense and paradoxical coexistence a third space identifiable with neither of the original two—a zone” (46). Either way, Blood Meridian’s basis in historical fact must be kept in tension with the neomythic elements which do demand exploration, as the opposition between these extremities allows for, or perhaps forces, the existence of the heterotopian zone.

In Blood Meridian, the rift between language and landscape, as it repre-sents physical reality, creates the Foucaultian gap between macrocosmic and microcosmic thought, between objective reality and objective thought. The imagery of Blood Meridian is one of the most bizarre features of the novel because McCarthy’s images speak of a land that is not entirely present; for a majority of the novel, the images all address a neomythic, postapocalyptic world that the narrative action does not necessarily support. This is the language of blood and masculinity, of sea creatures and personified dark-ness; this is Homer’s world not John Ford’s, a realm more similar to The Odyssey than any John Wayne film. The language creates a schism in the text, and in this rift the heterotopia is enacted.

Through the force of simile, McCarthy essentially eliminates the West from his otherwise western novel; what was once Mexico—and now Texas, thanks to men like Glanton—is now a neobiblical wasteland.9 The wilderness landscape of Blood Meridian is composed of brutal deserts and blinding snow, ghost towns and bleached skeletons, a more authentic and impassable “frontier” than Turner’s tough-but-conquerable West. However,

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McCarthy goes to great artistic lengths to make his West into more than the West, a type of hyperimagined West; the descriptions of the land leave the world of Texas and enter into a quasi-unimaginable land of the post-apocalypse.10 The novel is set in the West, with its mentioning of real west-ern cities and regions ranging from San Antonio to San Diego, although it seems difficult to reconcile this notion of reality with a land where “all was darkness and without definition,” of “the problematical destruction of darkness,” or a “land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear” (100, 105, 47). These landscapes must be in the West—because McCarthy’s novel never goes anywhere else—yet these are descriptions not of a real landscape but instead of some kind of primitive, hyperbolic hell. Using McHale’s theory, these contradictory drives of the novel can be reconciled, as he asserts that “spaces which real-world atlases or encyclopedias show as noncontiguous and unrelated, when juxtaposed in written texts constitute a zone” (Postmodernist Fiction 45); the atlas of the narrative shows Texas, the language says Old Testament. McCarthy has located a biblically inscribed hell in the middle of Texas, as one of the ex-priest’s speeches to the kid begins to illuminate:

Where for aught any man knows lies the locality of hell. For the earth is a globe in the void and truth there’s no up nor down to it and there’s men in this company besides myself seen little cloven hoofprints in the stone clever as a little doe in her going but what little doe ever trod melted rock? I’d not go behind scripture but it may be that there has been sinners so notorious evil that the fires coughed em up again and I could well see in the long ago how it was little devils with their pitchforks had traversed that fiery vomit for to salvage back those souls that had by misadventure been spewed up from their damnation onto the outer shelves of the world. Aye. It’s a notion, no more. But someplace in the scheme of things this world must touch the other. (130)

It is difficult to imagine a world western and biblical, but this postmod-ern environment McHale suggests is perhaps the best, if not the only, way to properly consider Blood Meridian; the ex-priest’s notion of these two environments, real and neobiblical, overlapping—indeed, touching—appears hyperbolic, but is this not the reality of McCarthy’s West ? That the devil is running around West Texas seems altogether possible in Blood Meridian; indeed, I would argue that reading against an interpretation of the judge-as-devil becomes more difficult throughout the course of the novel than just accepting this—albeit outlandish—eventuality. As extreme of an interpretation as this might be, McCarthy’s novel continually pre-

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vents the possibility of a realist reading despite its implied positioning in the mid-nineteenth-century West.

McCarthy’s West is a land where “all was darkness and without defi-nition,” where “in the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature” (100, 47); it is, at times, a world without form, a world straight out of Genesis. In the opening of Genesis, the emphasis is on a formless world in which the only divisions are based on light; in Blood Meridian, the focus, too, is on night and day, light and darkness, and a physical world without definition, where there is, just as in Genesis, “nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds.” With this in mind, the novel then seems to occupy a very specific moment in biblical time, somewhere between Genesis 1.5, when God names Day and Night, and Genesis 1.11, when God said “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit … with the seed in it,” as the land of McCarthy’s text is wholly without nurturing abilities. This is a pre-prelapsarian world, one without even the idea of moral codes or the concept of a people to break them; it is a land of light, dark, and formlessness, although how it came to exist in the West of McCarthy’s novel is somewhat of a mystery. Although the language is reminiscent of the Hebrew Bible, there is no God in Blood Meridian; He seems to have disappeared immediately after He created Day and Night.11 This leaves the kid and company to become “like beings provoked out of the abso-lute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes of Gondwanaland in a time before nomenclature was and each was all” (172). This rhetoric relentlessly undermines the western nature of the novel, as it becomes increasingly difficult to read the scalphunters as simply historical figures set to fictive music: “Crossing those barren gravel reefs in the night they seemed remote and without substance. Like a patrol condemned to ride out some ancient curse. A thing surmised from the blackness by the creak of leather and the chink of metal” (151). McCarthy moves the narrative out of the West and into Gondwanaland—part of the theoretical collective landmass of ancient prehistory—and transforms the scalphunting gang into the mythic undead.

Mediating the Modern and Postmodern

At some point, and it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where the shift occurs, lingual and narrative simile begin finally giving way to absolutism. By the time of the Yuma massacre at the ferry landing, reality has been left somewhere far behind; no longer is the western landscape simply like a godless, neomythic terrain, it is that world: “The desert upon which they

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were entrained was desert absolute and it was devoid of feature altogether and there was nothing to mark their progress upon it. The earth fell away on every side equally in its arcature and by these limits were they circum-scribed and of them were they locus” (295). Just as reality begins to falter and the West ceases to be the West, the myths of Blood Meridian eventually are no longer myths either. The neomythic language turns the western landscape into a neomythic terrain, at which point the mythology itself breaks down; mythology cannot become reality without the subsequent destruction of that mythology, although if ever a neomythic narrative were to distort the historic West, it would look something like McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

As Frank Kermode writes, “theory can obscure as well as facilitate,” and in a novel as seemingly deliberately obtuse as Blood Meridian, arguably any attempt to theorize or even rationalize a single interpretation from its pages is a losing endeavor (5). The product of Blood Meridian’s hetero-topian zone, of the continual conflict of history and the neomythic, of the conflation of the Bible and national mythologies, is a rather tenuous sense of profound irony; the landscape upon which McCarthy places his band of nation-settling scalphunters is a prehistoric biblical wasteland, in a “time before nomenclature was and each was all” (172), and this seems to simultaneously suggest and undermine the rather absurd notion that any land is ever unsettled, unless it is of such an age as to predate Genesis 1.11. By bringing into being a heterotopian zone, where history and myth might embody the same fictive space, Blood Meridian works to undermine traditional notions of historical record and national mytholo-gies, while simultaneously validating their existence as necessary for, if for no other reason, their final dismissal. The heterotopia of postmodernist literature suggests the decentered intellectual existence of contemporary late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century thought; in McCarthy’s text, this conflated zone seems to represent a complex realm that is both pre-history and the coming apocalypse, as the future is foretold in the past, as the “child the father of the man.” It is difficult to conclude whether McCarthy’s novel positively asserts anything, as it seems more concerned with deconstructing its heterotopian zone rather than participating in any positive affirmations or theoretical resolutions. Perhaps in the final analy-sis, this (mostly) postmodernist interpretation of Blood Meridian and its heterotopia ultimately necessitates the optimism of the modernist belief in the art itself as redemptive; without that faith, the novel unravels, albeit gloriously so, and the result is a structure of national history and myth that is altogether meaningless, altogether hopeless and, unfortunately, perhaps altogether accurate.

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Notes

1. According to Neil Campbell in his essay “Liberty beyond Its Proper Bounds: Cormac McCarthy’s History of the West in Blood Meridian,” McCarthy’s novel takes the myths of the West and “follows their strange logic to dark conclu-sions, to the point where the myths turn in on themselves, implode and begin to deconstruct. McCarthy’s work therefore creates the sense of reading simultane-ously a Western and an anti-Western” (218). This uncomfortable sense of the novel doing two things at the same time, of being and not being, is what my reading of the text as a heterotopia hopes to resolve.

2. Whether Blood Meridian is rightly classified as “modernist” or “postmod-ernist” is still heavily disputed. Campbell, among others, argues that because “any claims on absolute, authoritative truth are challenged, one locates McCarthy’s writing as ‘postmodern’” (218). In The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy, however, David Holloway labels McCarthy’s work as late modernist in order to suggest that it is a “kind of writing that embodies aspects of the postmodern so as to map a route through and beyond the condition it describes. A writing that seizes upon the postmodern so as to use it against itself and negate it dialectically from within” (4). Although both sides of the debate have their merits, my reading is more in line with Holloway’s; despite my reliance on the obviously postmod-ern heterotopian zone, I see this as a way of moving “through and beyond” the conditions of the text rather than as final destination. Additionally, only the term heterotopia is a product of postmodern theory, not the actual literary space; Foucault discusses texts several hundred years old as enacting this concept before any definitive theories explained its meaning.

3. In Regeneration through Violence, Slotkin explains that a mythology is a “complex of narratives that dramatizes the world vision and historical sense of a people or culture, reducing centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors. The narrative action of the myth-tale recapitulates that people’s experience in their land, rehearses their visions of that experience in its relation to their gods and the cosmos, and reduces both experience and vision to a paradigm” (6).

4. Campbell points to the novel’s specific relationship with Turner’s speech: “Blood Meridian is an excessive, revisionist and contradictory narrative of the American West which both rewrites the myths and histories of the West inherited from Frederick Jackson Turner and maintains and utilizes many of the Western archetypes familiar in this genre of writing” (217). David Holloway, in “‘A false book is no book at all,’” also takes note of the text’s relationship to Turner’s speech, as he argues that in the novel “there is the sustained assault on the notion of manifest destiny, a critique conducted in large part through McCarthy’s decon-struction of the Turner thesis, where frontier space is defined in a binary collision of savagery and civilization” (193).

5. A number of scholars have examined the text’s historical sources, but John Emil Sepich’s essay “‘What kind of indians was them?’” gives a particularly

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detailed account of the novel’s historical references. According to Sepich, history provides a crucial grounding for the novel, and “if its historical base is overlooked, McCarthy’s novel might appear as nothing more than three hundred pages of cir-cumstantial evidence (all gory) to assert Judge Holden’s claim of war’s dominance as a metaphor in the lives of men” (135). Instead, the novel moves among histori-cal eyewitness accounts, adding a disturbing gravity to the events of the text.

6. Similarities between myths have been of considerable interest to Structuralist critics as a way of understanding the fundamental correlations between societies. Claude Lévi-Strauss in particular studied the synchronic mythemes of mythology as a means of discovering the underlying correspondences between seemingly disparate stories: “Mythology confronts the student with a situation which at first sight appears contradictory. On the one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. There is no logic, no continuity. Any charac-teristic can be attributed to any subject; every conceivable relation can be found. With myth, everything becomes possible. But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions” (870). Lévi-Strauss’s theory of mythology, of the correla-tions between myths, is important for understanding McCarthy’s novel because without it, as Lévi-Strauss notes, it seems “anything is likely to happen.”

7. Shaviro also asserts that McCarthy’s novel posits no argument in favor of even potential moral redemption: “Blood Meridian is not a salvation narrative; we can be rescued neither by faith nor by works nor by grace. It is useless to look for ulterior, redemptive meanings. … What is most disturbing about the orgies of violence that punctuate Blood Meridian is that they fail to constitute a pattern, to unveil a mystery or to serve any comprehensible purpose. Instead, the book suggests that ‘a taste for mindless violence’ (3) is as ubiquitous—and as banal—as any other form of ‘common sense’” (146–47).

8. McHale argues that there is an interstitial space “constituted whenever we recognize the relations among two or more texts, or between specific texts and larger categories such as genre, school, period. There are a number of ways of foregrounding this intertextual space and integrating it in the text’s structure, but none is more effective than the device of ‘borrowing’ a character from another text—‘transworld identity,’ Umberto Eco has called this, the transmigration of characters from one fictional universe to another” (Postmodernist Fiction 57).

9. In The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy, Vereen Bell, one of the earliest McCarthy critics, notes that McCarthy’s novels (at least his first five, concluding with Blood Meridian) “belligerently resist abstraction” through the “concreteness” of his writing and that “the world itself is mysterious enough without involving ideas or transcendence of it” (2, 2, 3). His argument is that McCarthy resists phil-osophical “abstraction” (2). As a result, “the world is convincingly present to us, material but more than usually real” and “we are reminded again that experience is primarily not universal but particular, that we live not in an outline but in a place” (3, 4). The sense of place and materiality that Bell points to in McCarthy’s

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work is certainly evident, but what world is “convincingly present to us”? While not abstract per se, the problem is that the locality of Blood Meridian is also far from known with any certainty; even if it is known as “the West,” Bell’s observa-tion that the world is “more than usually real” in fact creates more questions than it answers given the impossibility of this simile-constructed otherness of place.

10. One of the few other artists whose vision of the West is somehow not the West is director Sergio Leone, whose cinematic West in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) seems to approach the bleak and wholly barren West of McCarthy. Ironically, or perhaps tellingly as it relates to Blood Meridian, the primary reason behind Leone’s West looking so different, so postapocalyptic, is that the film was shot in Spain, and therefore, it similarly relates to McHale’s heterotopian zone as a site of “noncontiguous” realities.

11. Several critics have noted the absence of God in McCarthy’s text. In her essay “The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness: Mythic Reconstructions in Blood Meridian,” Sara Spurgeon points to the godless world of the novel: “It is true that the Christian God and the moral structures He represents are absent in the natural world of Blood Meridian, at least as a cipher-able entity to the travelers” (81). In “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy,” Leo Daugherty makes a related observation, although he approaches God’s absence through gnostic thought, arguing that this is part of the fundamental framework of Blood Meridian. His focus, in particular, is on the ways in which the absence of the “Gnostic god,” who, “being totally not of this world, generates no nomos, no law, for either nature or human activity,” and sets up a reliance on the archons, or lords, for law; in the case of Blood Meridian, the archon is the judge (159). The earth of McCarthy’s text, therefore, is part of this gnostic tradition, and Daugherty examines the actions of the judge, the kid, the graver, and the man of the epilogue against these strains of the gnostic tradition that permeate the text.

Works Cited

Arnold, Edwin T., and Dianne C. Luce. eds. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

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

Campbell, Neil. “Liberty beyond Its Proper Bounds: Cormac McCarthy’s History of the West in Blood Meridian.” In Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Rick Wallach, 217–26. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.

Daugherty, Leo. “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.” In Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, 157–72. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage/Random House, 1973.

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Holloway, David. “‘A false book is no book at all’: The Ideology of Representation in Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy.” In Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, edited by Rick Wallach, 185–200. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000.

———. The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002.

Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” 1955. In The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H. Richter, 868–77. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1989.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1985.

McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London, UK: Routledge, 1992.———. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.The New Oxford Annotated Bible. 3rd ed. Edited by Michael D. Coogan. Oxford,

UK: Oxford University Press, 2001.Sepich, John Emil. “‘What kind of indians was them?’: Some Historical Sources

in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” In Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, 121–41. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Shaviro, Steven. “‘The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian.” In Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, 143–56. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.

Shaw, Patrick W. The Modern American Novel of Violence. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing, 2000.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973.

Spurgeon, Sara. “The Sacred Hunter and the Eucharist of the Wilderness: Mythic Reconstructions in Blood Meridian.” In Cormac McCarthy: New Directions, edited by James D. Lilley, 75–101. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1893. Washington, DC: GPO, 1894.