An invitation to look at a literary work in a new way
Analysing Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West'
In my book, The Unknown Storyteller (The Squeeze Press, 2022), I look at the deep underlying patterns which story follows across a variety of narrative forms. You can find out more in a series of lectures I’ve given to date about the approach which are featured on YouTube here.
Recently, Richard Kelly James, a member of The Unknown Storyteller Group on Facebook asked how it might be applied to Cormac McCarthy’s book, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, a work which is linked to works by Milton, Melville, and Faulkner.
It’s an interesting challenge – and as a result, I’ve committed to working through it and seeing what happens. Richard’s a fan of McCarthy’s work, and has a blog dedicated to Blood Meridian in particular.
The project is noteworthy and complements other approaches to the work. Richard’s blog and other critical works which analyse it focus primarily on analysing the narrative – the narrative structure, the intertextuality of the work, and the symbolism and themes it deals with. Looking at McCarthy’s work using the approach outlined in The Unknown Storyteller involves looking primarily at the events which underpin the narrative – stated and implied and seeing how they map to clearly identified story structures. Having done that, we can look at the extent to which the narrative treatment supports or counterpoints the qualities of the story structures involved.
I have no idea what the analysis will reveal, as the methodology involves ordering events in chronological order, and I have no idea whether the last section of the book will have a reference to the earliest event in the timeline covered, so we’ll just have to see what happens when we get there.
From mid-January 2022 onwards, I’ll be posting something up once a week (as a minimum commitment) based on my reading of the book. I invite you to join in, and take part in the process. It's likely to be an asynchronous thing, as people read and process at different speeds, but that’s not a bad thing, but it would be good to eliminate spoilers, so that people who are reading the work for the first time (as I am) are able to follow its flow.