“Men are made of the dust of the earth”: Time, Space, Matter, and Meaning in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

While the narrative of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian is expansive and involved, suggesting an unearthly realm of deeply resonant symbolic meaning, the lack of a reflective consciousness at the mimetic level leaves description the only form of convincing representation, opening up on an evolutionary vista beyond human valuation. But description in the novel is not wholly disembodied, outside time and space; it receives its impetus from the movement of characters through the landscape, the world of natural and cultural phenomena. Through his engagement with the exhaustive particularity of this chronotopic continuum, McCarthy is able to go beyond both metaphysical speculation and evolutionary determinism and offer a view of the individual in his proper relation to human history and the natural world, harnessing his ostensibly senseless narrative of violence to an ongoing struggle for meaning and moral articulation.