Blood Meridian's Chronotopic Gates: Reading Cormac McCarthy through the Lens of a Literary-Historical GIS

Abstract

This geographical information systems (GIS) reading of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) provides a literary geography analysis that plots latitude and longitude coordinates in conjunction with Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s chronotopes of the Road, the Rabelaisian, the Petty-Bourgeois Provincial Town, the Threshold and the political cartography of the United States–Mexico border established by the 1849 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to map the emergence of an American Imperial chronotope. Blood Meridian is a fictionalized account of historical events carried out by the Glanton Gang, a band of mercenaries contracted by Governor Trias in 1849 to counter the threat of Apache raids in Chihuahua province, Mexico. Viewed through the lenses of a GIS/MAXQDA platform, Blood Meridian comes into focus as ‘cartographical novel’ illuminating its literary geography as a melange, spun from allusions to and spatial remediations of Classical, medieval and Indigenous mythologies. The GIS/MAXQDA platform frames Blood Meridian as deep chronotopic map that, in tracing the spiralling lifepath of its protagonist, the ‘Kid’, across the terra damnata of the American Southwest and northern Mexico, creates an analogy and spatial metaphor for the violent geographical teleology of US nineteenth-century westward expansion which unfolded between the 1830s and 1880s.