Blood Meridian, Lecture One: See the Child (Chapters I-V) (Patreon)

'He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.'

Today we are descending into the first five chapters of Blood Meridian.

As this is a lengthy lecture, with a heavy subject matter, please do feel free to use the timestamps below to view it in the manner that best suits you.

After the timestamps, we have some questions for you and a reading sheet attached at the bottom of the post with the extracts presented in this lecture.

Blood Meridian Series:

• How to Read Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 
• Breaking into Blood Meridian (Title, Epigraphs & Assigned Reading) 

Lecture Timestamps:

• 0:00 deep-reading the first page
• 3:00 Cormac McCarthy & the oral tradition
• 5:00 meeting our central protagonist
• 6:00 “See the child.”
• 8:00 Joseph Conrad on art
• 14:00 “the child is the father of the man”
• 14:30 the poetry of William Wordsworth
• 16:50 the joys of appreciating allusions
• 17:10 the Romantic poets on childhood
• 18:30 when we find ourselves in hell
• 19:30 is Blood Meridian a nihilistic novel?
• 20:00 the iceberg theory of allusions
• 22:00 great fires and floods
• 23:20 Wordsworth’s iconic ode
• 25:00 quoting poets whose names are lost
• 26:20 Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’
• 27:00 “In the beginning…”
• 29:00 finding light in the darkness
• 29:40 the Lear-like absence of the matriarch
• 30:30 the absence of women in McCarthy
• 31:00 reading Moby Dick against Blood Meridian
• 32:30 the Leonids of 1833
• 33:10 is Blood Meridian past or future?
• 34:00 the pacing of Blood Meridian
• 35:00 man created out of clay/mud/dust
• 40:00 is absence of God proof of non-existence?
• 41:50 Plato’s theory of forms/ideas
• 43:00 Captain Ahab, Don Quixote & Aristotle
• 45:00 the value of rereading Blood Meridian
• 46:00 “a shadowed agony in the garden.”
• 47:00 reading Blood Meridian as morality play
• 50:00 parricide and the death of God
• 52:00 the sermon of Reverend Green
• 54:00 meeting Judge Holden
• 56:00 Thoreau and the language of stones
• 58:00 meeting Toadvine, and reading aloud
• 59:00 the respect of men who fight each other
• 1:00:00 is Blood Meridian too violent for adaptation?
• 1:01:00 McCarthy’s untranslated Spanish
• 1:02:00 meeting the slaver hermit
• 1:04:00 Dante’s Inferno (midway upon the journey)
• 1:05:00 McCarthy’s changing tenses (past & present)
• 1:07:00 the hermit’s theological discussion
• 1:10:00 the line separating good and evil
• 1:11:00 McCarthy’s religious structures
• 1:13:00 the recurring baptismal motifs
• 1:14:30 meeting Captain White
• 1:15:00 Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’
• 1:20:00 the Mexican-American War
• 1:21:00 manifest destiny & border wars
• 1:23:00 what does “filibuster” mean?
• 1:24:00 the Monroe Doctrine
• 1:28:50 the biblical stories of Lazarus
• 1:31:00 language appreciation & McCarthy’s similes
• 1:36:00 sun as violently phallic symbol
• 1:36:55 Wallace Stevens’ ‘Auroras of Autumn’
• 1:38:00 what is the Sublime?
• 1:40:00 McCarthy, Faulkner & Hemingway
• 1:41:30 ‘The Old Man and the Sea’
• 1:44:00 Dostoyevsky, fear & true geology
• 1:45:00 long sentences & beauty in brutality
• 1:48:00 a breathless, bloody description
• 1:51:30 the synopses at start of chapters
• 1:54:00 the search for God & riding through hell
• 1:54:40 questions for you

Mentioned in this lecture:

Beowulf, Homer, Milton, Joseph Conrad, Wordsworth, Dante, Hieronymus Bosch, Herman Melville, the King James Bible, Parmenides, Carl Jung, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Cervantes, Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, Dostoyevsky, Thoreau, Joseph Campbell, Solzhenitsyn, Marcel Proust, Edmund Burke, Longinus, Wallace Stevens, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.

Optional tasks to orient your reading: 

• As you continue to ‘ride on’ through Blood Meridian, collect your favourite passages and lines. Be on the lookout for those parts of the prose that stir something inside you. Do you like the rhythm? The sound? The imagery? You might try to discern if you have stumbled across an allusion (an indirect reference to other areas of high literature, like Shakespeare or the Bible).
• Pick an achievable handful of other works you can run alongside your reading of Blood Meridian. This could look like dipping into an anthology of Romantic poetry, it could look like reading through Shakespeare’s tragedies, it could mean breaking into related works of philosophy, psychology, or history. Indeed, this could involve bringing a reread of a bigger work to bear upon this novel (Moby Dick is a great one for this). In this way, you are creating a conversation that will open up your appreciation of Cormac McCarthy’s work.
• Bonus: Read your favourite passages aloud (or subvocalise them). Like poetry, reading McCarthy aloud unlocks meaning.

Some Questions:

1) Have you found your reading of Blood Meridian difficult so far? If so, why? Are the difficulties primarily due to the violent subject matter, the aesthetic style, or something else?

2) Have you found any favourite similes or metaphors? Or are there any passages that you absolutely must share with someone?

3) Is Blood Meridian a nihilistic book?

4) What do you make of the characters? Are they like any other characters you have encountered in your reading experience? And how do you feel having met the frightening Judge Holden?

5) Could Blood Meridian be adapted for the screen? Should it?

Happy reading, folks!