On the Germanic Element in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

Abstract

abstract:Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is prefaced by an epigraph from seventeenth-century German philosopher and theologian Jacob Boehme and the last chapter heading of the novel is a quotation in German that references as many as three other famous figures in German literature, including twentieth-century writer Thomas Mann. This article investigates the significance of this framing of the novel by Germanic writing. With close readings of Mann and Boehme in particular, I argue that what McCarthy takes from these writers is a dualistic or double-voiced aesthetic that allows him to present to the reader the antithetical sides of America's Germanic or Teutonic heritage, allowing them to render their judgment of it. In Blood Meridian, the historical legacy of American Anglo-Saxonism is ostentatiously evident in the narrative of Indigenous genocide, but so too are divergent or opposing aesthetic and theological legacies of German culture. This includes McCarthy's borrowing of Germanic allegorical techniques, which precipitate out of the narrative material a distinct if obscure meaning that permeates the narrative without controlling or containing it. The Germanic element in Blood Meridian thus speaks to some of the most important of the novel's aesthetic, political, and theological concerns.