Chapter 27 - The San Marcos Archives: Blood Meridian and the West

Summary

McCarthy’s shift in geographical focus from the south to the west, and his decision to adopt the Western genre as his primary mode of storytelling, signaled a shift to a more overtly philosophical mode. Though many of the same topics are present in earlier novels, metaphysics, theology, and ethics become integral elements within McCarthy’s Western novels, and Blood Meridian stands as the inaugural effort in this new fictional mode. So, unsurprisingly, in his archived papers we find scribbled quotations of Ruskin on war, or of Heraclitus on war, or of Tolstoy on free will, or of Flaubert on Gnostic cosmology. But whatever precipitated the philosophical turn, the absence of the judge in the earliest draft in the Wittliff papers, a draft that reads like a more conventional Western, indicates that the philosophical turn coincided with the creation of the judge, who in later drafts and the published novel serves to elevate the narrative to a more profound register. He is the philosophical center of gravity in the published novel, and his absence in the early draft accounts for the consequent lightness of what looks like the beginning of a picaresque buddy western. This chapter highlights the differences between the early genre piece and the published novel, and argues that the change was due to McCarthy’s decision to pursue overt philosophical themes through the introduction of Judge Holden.