What can we learn about how literature works by looking at it through the lens of story structure?
An exploration of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian - 01
In my book, The Unknown Storyteller or What Makes Story ‘Story’? (The Squeeze Press, 2022), I outline a new methodology for analysing narratives based on the work of George Spencer-Brown.
A few weeks ago, Kelly James, a member of The Unknown Storyteller Group on Facebook asked what light the methodology might shed on Cormac McCarthy’s novel, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. It wasn’t a work I was familiar with, so I thought, ‘Why not see?’
I’ve been reading through the work and invite others to join me as I go through the process and demonstrate how the approach might be applied.
Any methodology needs a clear approach, so here are the first few steps I propose people take:
Select a story to analyse.
Note the source version, where relevant.
Summarise the story in ‘bare bones’ form.
Note the story opening and closing, stated or implied.
Identify the main characters and their initial situation (who, when, where, and in what condition).
We’ve already taken the first step.
What’s the source version? I’m working from the 2015 Picador edition. There are others. They differ. Kelly remarks on some of the differences in his blog post here (footnote 1).
Step 3 is impossible to complete without reading the work, so that’s what I’m setting out to do. I’ll come back to step 4 in a while. For now, let’s see if we can establish some information relating to step 5.
‘See the child.’
We have a child. That’s the first ‘who’.
Where? Near a scullery fire, so in an interior domestic setting.
When? As the exterior setting is described as featuring ‘dark turned fields with rags of snow’ with ‘darker woods’ with ‘a few last wolves’ in them, we get the sense that this is one of the rag-tail ends of winter – either early, when the snow is just forming, or late, when it is melting away. A few lines in, we learn that the child was born in ‘’33, and further on, we find out that that means 1833, and that he’s in his early teens.
When the story opens, he’s stoking the fire. The condition he’s in is unclear. He’s described as ‘pale and thin’, watching his drunken ex-schoolmaster father. We have no idea of what his thoughts or feelings might be.
Thus beings Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West.
But wait - this might be the beginning - but it isn't the opening - oh yeah - mustn't forget the openings!
How does the work open?
Here I draw on oral storytelling traditions. We tend to forget, given the primacy of literacy in our culture (broad generalisation, I know, but I think it’s fair) that the spoken word comes before the written word and before people were writing stories, they were telling stories. Oral storytelling depends much more on openings and closings to bring people out of the everyday world into the world of story and back again.
With a work like Blood Meridian - or any published work of fiction, we have the writer’s frame (the title, subtitle, the front matter), and we have the frame of the printed work - which can vary across editions. I've already pointed to how subtitles can be presented differently. Then there are cover designs, the look and feel of a particular edition or printing.
These elements act individually and collectively as portals from the everyday world into the world of story generally - and more specifically, a particular story.
So … how does the story, as it is told in book form, open for you?
If you enjoy story, find out more about The Unknown Storyteller project. It maps 18 distinct story structures (excluding comedy and tragedy) identified so far using only 6 simple basic visually intuitive symbols that will enable you to find out more about how story ‘stories’ on my website at leonconrad.com — not to mention some very cool writing exercises that will help you tell the stories you want to tell more effectively.