Notes on Blood Meridian (2013) by John Sepich

Book Review 

Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition 

(Southwestern Writers Collection Series, 

Wittliff Collections at Texas State University)(2013)

John Sepich and Edwin T. Arnold

   Here are my highlighted quotes from this book:

Meanwhile, Blood Meridian‘s readership continued to grow, as did academic interest in the book and its author. Harold Bloom’s proclamation in 2000 that Blood Meridian was “the authentic American apocalyptic novel” and that “Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner” was the imprimatur that finally ushered the book into the realm of the modern classics.

Two possible influences on Outer Dark, apart from the obvious spirit of Flannery O’Connor, are Eudora Welty’s Robber Bridegroom (1946) and Madison Jones’s Forest of the Night (1960).

Bartlett writes of the New Almaden cinnabar mine located thirteen miles from the bay of San Francisco.

  Mostly what I harvested from Notes on Blood Meridian is a better idea of the primary sources that McCarthy likely used in preparing to write this book.  One of the issues that McCarthy clearly faced was the potential demystification of his work.  All artists face a potential "disenchantment" process that is linked directly to the production, evaluation and consumption of art-products by different audiences.   The classic posture of this art production dilemma is the artist who rails at false critics and later lives to regret it when there are no critics, not even false ones, describing their art.

  McCarthy managed to side step this problem by never talking to anyone about his work.  But that doesn't mean the work remained undone.  I was able to locate a host of primary sources- most related to the violence between American settlers and Native Americans in the American west and southwest in the mid to late 19th century.  Blood Meridian is very much about this world- the American southwest of the 1850's/60s/70s and McCarthy appears to have approached it much as a historian would. He pulled many ideas and minute details from the historical sources and then accreting is own artistic inspiration.

   I found many of these inspirational titles available in the LAPL and checked out a handful, but unfortunately they are almost all uniformly long and hard to read, so not sure how far that will go, but I'm very interested in the later history of the wars between the American Government and Native American tribes in the west in the 1860's and 70's.