It's Cormac McCarthy season. I've just finished rereading this for the first time in about 12 or 13 years. I may record on this soon for the next In the Stacks, but either way here are some random thoughts upon finishing.
This is his masterpiece, the most Cormac McCarthy Cormac McCarthy. Suttree is the most underread and underrated, his most personal and comic. But Blood Meridian is the summit and summation of his art.
Comparisons between Blood Meridian and Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove as the Great Western Novel are inevitable, but it's apples and oranges. McMurtry is Tolstoy on the Lone Prairie; he writes as if modernism never happened, which is fine. I love Lonesome Dove. I can't and won't choose between them. In John David Ebert's otherwise excellent commentary on Blood Meridian, he dismisses Lonesome Dove as middlebrow trash. "Middlebrow" is really just the 19th-century novel as George Eliot or even Flaubert would've recognized it, & McMurtry excels here, at least with that novel. McCarthy, as is typical of postmodernists, fuses lowbrow pulp action and tropes with highbrow style and ideas. Different aesthetic worlds entirely. Those who apply the standards of 19th-century realism, like B.R. Myers in his infamous A Reader's Manifesto, will inevitably lambast McCarthy with the wrong canon.
JDE Ebert makes a brilliant observation that Shiva is the reigning god of this novel. We should read the Judge's macabre dancing in the final pages in this light. I will have more to say about this.
Because all of the other characters are so slight, the Judge is the imaginal center of the book. We are tempted to take his philosophy therefore as the book's philosophy, just as we are tempted to take Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost.
The Judge's philosophy owes a great deal to the philosophy of Heraclitus, the dark sage of ancient Greece, the philosopher of fire. One day I will do a series on the 4 Elements, and the "Fire" episode will certainly deal with Heraclitus and McCarthy.
If you go back and read the epigraphs by Valery & Boehme, you can hear them in the Judge's voice.
Symbols: Trees, Stars, Stones, Sand, Blood, Fire, Eggs. What is a "Journey to the West" as opposed to a "Journey to the East"? Burroughs also makes use of this notion, going back to the ancient Egyptian idea.
As we get to the end of the novel, the westward motion becomes more linear, and we wind up in California. There's more sand in this section, including a striking scene in which the kid and companion are able to escape the Judge because the wind wipes their footprints away. The word "silica" and variants begins to be used more often. Silica is what allows sand to become glass. One silicate mineral is silicon, as in "Silicon Valley." This is a connection I first pondered when researching Junger's Glass Bees. Now just for fun, look up the molecular structure of silicic acid. What does it look like?
McCarthy's favorite word is "reckon" its and variants.