I presented my essay, “Vicious Circle” in Albuquerque in 2019, and at Allen Josephs’ encouragement I’ve been working for the last year to expand that essay into a full-fledged book. Today I’m covering a lot of ground, condensing my “Grand Unified Theory” of Cormac McCarthy into just 20 minutes, so hang on tight!

I’ve set out to write a book about a book, though it’s not the book I originally set out to write. I originally set out to write a book about my family’s Civil War experiences, emulating the style of novelist Shelby Foote, whom some of you may recognize as the bearded Southern Gentleman narrator of Ken Burns’ PBS mini-series The Civil War. In researching Foote’s writing methods, I learned that he was an early proponent of Cormac McCarthy, and Foote recommended McCarthy for the MacArthur grant that supported him in part while he wrote Blood Meridian. Foote later provided prefatory material for John Sepich’s Notes on Blood Meridian, in which Sepich revealed that Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession provided the historical basis for Blood Meridian. Foote said that the true hero in McCarthy’s works is the English language, or more specifically, the American language. Foote spoke truer than he knew, for Blood Meridian is the central novel of McCarthy’s canon, and at its core is an allegorical origin story for language itself.

After more than thirty years, Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West⁠ remains one of the most elusive and allusive novels in Cormac McCarthy’s canon.⁠ An exploration of the novel’s many allusions led me to a new comprehensive interpretation of the book incorporating the historical revelations of John Sepich, the Nietzschean interpretation of Shane Shimpf, and the Gnostic interpretations of Leo Daugherty and Petra Mundik. In addition to referencing numerous literary works and thinkers, Blood Meridian repeatedly alludes to itself. Hundreds of carefully placed mirrors — words, phrases, themes, and structures— occur throughout the book. These mirrors form a ‘vicious circle’ as an expression of Friedrich Nietzsche’s August 1881 realization of the Eternal Return, that “everything becomes and recurs eternally.”⁠. Though the bulk of the novel is a “meditation on a Nietzschean world where God has died,”⁠ the epilogue, viewed through a Gnostic lens, provides a glimmer of hope opposing this nihilism.

In his essay, “Of Judge Holden’s Hats; or The Palindrome in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Christopher Forbis cites more than sixty mirrors throughout the book to convincingly argue that Blood Meridian is a palindrome. “By way of method,” Forbis explains, “I ball-point pen numbered a copy of Blood Meridian’s last page, the Epilogue at 337, with a zero, until on the novel’s earliest page, of epigraphs, I wrote 337. All page-pairs that sum to 337 are exact mirrors.” Forbis then searched through the book marking dozens of mirrors he found, allowing for a two-page margin of error. One of the most striking sets of mirrors that Forbis cites concerns hats:

After he has disrupted the Reverend Green’s sermon, the judge stands at the bar with two hats and a double handful of coins in front of him, one of the hats likely the Reverend Green’s former ‘collection plate.’ On the mirror page at the book’s end, the showman in a tyrolean costume moves among the crowd shaking coins in his hat, while the judge wears a “round hat with a narrow brim.” On the book’s meridian page, at a peak moment for the gang, the judge appears last of all at the governor’s ball, clad in a freshly tailored suit complete with a Panama hat joined from “two such lesser hats” with such skill that “the joinery did scarcely show at all.” Forbis argues that the spliced hat is a metaphor for the novel. Indeed, the hat crowns the book’s most striking figure, the judge.⁠

Though Forbis cites an impressive number of mirrors, he offers no explanation for their meaning. So on April Fool’s Day of 2018, I began a possible fool’s errand to determine the meaning of these mysterious mirrors in Blood Meridian. I copied Forbis’s technique of numbering the book’s pages backward, and as Forbis had focused on the judge’s spliced hat at the book’s center, it was there that I began my search, taking the number of pages in my copy and dividing by two to find the middle, or meridian, page of the novel. This line nearly leapt off that page at me:

“Cigars were presented and glasses of sherry poured and the governor standing at the head of the table made them welcome and issued orders to his chamberlain that every need be seen to.”⁠⁠ In his Notes on Blood Meridian, John Sepich reveals that Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue provides the historical framework for McCarthy’s tale. Here on the book’s meridian page, McCarthy slyly confesses to lifting the backbone of the story from My Confession by having the governor issue “orders to his chamberlain.”

Upon discovering what I believe to be a secret clue to the book’s origin, I began an ongoing treasure hunt to find hundreds of new mirrors and hidden details in Blood Meridian. I could spout mirrors for hours, but in the interest of time, I’ve picked just one prime example that hopefully demonstrates that these mirrors are not merely a seeker’s projection:

At the jail in Chihuahua City, the kid takes up a pallet with Toadvine and another Kentuckian, a veteran of the war: Grannyrat Chambers, who describes the battle at Mier, where he sat against a wall with his shattered leg stretched out listening to a lull in the firing that grew into a strange silence, and in this silence there grew a low rumbling. He tells of how an army of irregulars took the city of Chihuahua clothed in rags and underwear, how the cannonballs were solid copper and came loping through the grass like runaway suns, how at night they sat by the fires listening to the moans of the dying. He’d heard stories of Mexican soldiers chained to the trailspades. They picked powder in the locks and blowed them gates open, releasing prisoners that looked like skinned rats — the Whitest Mexicans you’ll ever see. Old Bill turned all the prisoners loose, and then whipped two to death for stealing. The kid pokes at his bowl while listening and asks, “What is this?” To be told “That’s prime bullmeat, son. Don’t let it feel ye to weaken.” The kid chews and listens, and he chews and tells of his encounter with the Comanche. “I’m proud I missed that dance. Them is some cruel sons of bitches,” says the veteran.

On nearly the mirror page, the Borginnis woman reads Cloyce Bell riot over his treatment of the idiot, asking “If your mother was to see him, what do you reckon she’d say. Ain’t you ashamed? Cloyce replies, “I can’t do any more than what I’ve done.” “Damn if you aint a sorry specimen,” she retorts. She and the women take the idiot to the river, and Toadvine asks the kid where are they taking it? The kid doesn’t know. She reaches in and takes him by the hand and receives him, handing him down. She is smeared with feces but seems not to notice, and tells the other women to “Burn that thing.” “Imagine having this child penned up like a wild animal,” she says. That night, the idiot sits before the migrants’ fires in a coarse woven wool suit. A fish colored moon rises, and the Borginnis woman strips the idiot to his underwear and tucks him in, only for the naked idiot to reappear, whimpering and pushing at things in the night. He hoots softly and his voice passes from him so that no sound echoes back. The judge on his midnight rounds rescues the idiot, snatching him aloft by the heels.

Blood Meridian is certainly a Vicious Circle, but there is more going on in this strange loop of a book than just Nietzsche and Gnosticism, and the mirrors extend beyond Blood Meridian.

If we count The Border Trilogy as one book, and we include the allegedly forthcoming book The Passenger, there will be nine novels in McCarthy’s canon. Four books before Blood Meridian and four books after. And just as there are nine books total, there are nine words in the title: Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West. Even trickier, there are 30 words total in all the titles of the books, the same number of days in a month, and the judge is repeatedly linked with the moon. This might seem like I’ve lost my marbles, but there are 60 marks separating scenes in Blood Meridian, and there are 60 notches on the Ishango Bone, a 25,000 year old engraved bone tool that is perhaps the earliest example of symbolic notation. Alexander Marshack speculates that this bone functioned as a primitive lunar calendar. Hundreds of mirrors occur in Blood Meridian, but the fearful symmetry extends to the the themes of his other works. Working outward from the center novel, Suttree is the story of a man who voluntarily leaves a way of life, while The Border Trilogy is a story of a way of life that is taken. Child of God is the story of a killer who is stopped by the police, while No Country for Old Men is a story of a lawman who stops policing and is unable to stop the killer. Outer Dark is a tale of a father who fails to protect his son and the child dies. In The Road, a father protects his son who lives while the father dies. It is interesting to speculate what the mirrors between The Orchard Keeper and McCarthy’s forthcoming novel, The Passenger, might be.

The central circle is a metaphor for the paradox of language.

So what is language? It’s a complex semiotic system, that is a system composed of signs, of greater importance to individuals that perhaps any other system. A sign is anything that can stand for something else. Ferdinand de Saussure proposed a triad model for the “whole” of the sign of the signified, the signifier, and the referent. The mental portion of the sign he represented as a circular two-sided model, like a sheet of paper, with the two sides being the signified and the signifier, separated by a bar. Using the example of a horse, the signified is the mental image, the concept of an equine animal, while the signifier is the sound pattern “horse.” The referent is what kicks you.

The sign is arbitrary, which is to say that there is nothing about the sound pattern “horse” that implies the animal, nor is there anything about the animal which implies the sound pattern “horse.” If the sign weren’t arbitrary, there would be only ONE language. A language is a repository of these sound patterns. But it is not simply a nomenclature system.

As the sign is arbitrary, the meaning of each sign is not inherent. Each sign has meaning precisely because it is NOT all the other signs. Its meaning is apparent due to its relation with other signs. The sign is linear, as time only flows in one direction. Saussure provided a diagram:

Meaning and value are not synonymous. A sign gains its value by some sort of strange societal agreement. Somehow we all agree that “horse” means horse, and these ephemeral agreements are ever-changing. Language is therefore never a set thing, there’s what it was and what it is.

Blood Meridian is a book of many signs, perhaps the most noticeable signs are the archaic vocabulary and the pervasive violence. Words and war. War is language, and all other trades are contained in that of war. Rick Wallach pointed out in Sacred Violence that the semiotic systems within Blood Meridian are embedded concentrically: The English narration of the gypsy woman’s Spanish fortune-telling of the Tarot deck, which is itself yet another sort of language.

Referring to Saussure’s model of the sign, the book’s opening line commands us to form a mental image of the signified — “See the child.” Next we encounter the Judge at Reverend Green’s sermon, where he informs us “Ladies and gentlemen I feel it is my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an impostor…” The signifier is a sort of an impostor for the actual thing, the referent that kicks you. Glanton’s first action is to kick the wooden doors for entry to the governor’s mansion in Chihuahua City. Glanton represents the referent, the kid is the signified, and the judge is the signifier. Glanton is reality, the kid is an expression of reality, and the judge is a reflection of reality, a “false mirror” as McCarthy describes him in a handwritten note in an early draft of Blood Meridian in the Witliff archives.

The signified and signifier are separated by a bar and can never touch. The judge reaches through the bars of the kid’s jail cell and says, “Come here, let me touch you.”

As the sign is arbitrary, so too is the pervasive violence throughout the book. Signs exist in eternal antagonism. The judge declares, “What brings men together is not the sharing of bread, but the sharing of enemies.” Additionally, because each sign derives its meaning by virtue of it not being another sign, effectively all is negation, which explains McCarthy’s archaic use of the word “nor” in such phrases as “Little was said, nor were they quarrelsome.” And as signs form a chain from which we derive their meaning, McCarthy presents us with a chain of “circular packets” of information.

But as meaning and value are not the same, in the world of Blood Meridian it is the judge who grants signs their value. After the surgery to remove the arrow shaft from the kid’s leg, in his ether delirium, the kid dreams of the judge.

“In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit.” He enshadows “an artisan and a worker in metal” “where he crouches at his trade” “hammering out … some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.” The coldforger is the demiurge, the semi-malevolent Gnostic creator god, and he is hammering out the two-sided coinage of the sign so that the judge may approve his handiwork and grant the sign its value to be traded by men.

McCarthy foreshadows this dream when the hermit, the true God, tells the kid “You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”

Not only does the judge give signs their value, the judge is the author of the story, ever-scribbling in his notebook, controlling events, pulling the strings. The gypsy woman raises up on a string. The judge’s coin is fashioned to some subtle lead which he pulls in a series of elongations before flinging it out into the night to have it return. The kid rides like a mounted marionette and the judge holds the fool’s tether. In fact, not only does the judge control events in the book, the judge IS the book, for he is a draftsman as he IS other things, and the arc of circling bodies is determined by the length of their tether. Moons, coins, men. The novel proper is 336 pages and the judge’s weight is 336 pounds. As God spoke the world into existence, the judge writes it out of existence in a mirror-image of John 1:1.

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” As words ARE things, the mirror-image of the Word is the Mirror.
“At the end will be the Mirror and the Mirror will be with the judge and the Mirror will be the judge.”

Although in our world the sign is linear, the sign of the world of Blood Meridian is circular. In August of last year, I set out to read Blood Meridian backwards, much like playing a vinyl record backwards in search of a Satanic message. Very quickly, I realized something tricky was going on. In the last paragraph of the novel proper, which becomes the “first” paragraph when read backwards, the judge “sashays backwards.” Reading the book backwards was a bizarre experience that took 51 days. At times, it felt like McCarthy (or the judge) was speaking directly to me: “Don’t look away. Where only the rules are at hazard. A solitary game without opponent.” Additionally, though the meanings of words and sentences change when read backwards, the story still “makes sense.” For example, in the book’s opening paragraph, which becomes the closing paragraph when read in reverse, the kid “has a sister in this world that he will not see again. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it.” Manuel Broncano writes that although McCarthy’s works are structured canonically, McCarthy “subverts the very canon.” I believe McCarthy is slyly referring to a short piece of music by Johannes Sebastian Bach from The Musical Offering called the Canon Cancrizans, or crab canon. A musical canon is a piece that repeats a theme in variations that harmonize with itself. The crab canon is a musical puzzle in which the theme is identical played forward and backwards and harmonizes with itself. The kid and Toadvine “circle crabwise” when fighting in the mud and the judge pries from its trucks and tricks the Yumas with the unloaded howitzer— all references to a subverted canon.

Here are some examples of Bach’s Crab Canon:
 

As the judge is the personification of war, he is also the personification of language. Words ARE things, and as words can have multiple meanings, so too does the judge have multiple emanations. In fact, the judge is anyone in the book who does not die— Tobin, the fool, Shelby, Tate, the Loonies, the little girl with the bear, the governor — “All dead save me!” Declares the Judge. He is stone, water, golden disclet leaves, bats, flies, wolves, the very wind. The judge’s world is a “Trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent.” And as the judge IS the governor, at the center of McCarthy’s central work is the governor’s BALL, a metaphor for language whose echoes reverberate throughout McCarthy’s canon.

So I’ve come full circle. I set out to determine the meaning of the mysterious mirrors in Blood Meridian: The meaning is meaning. As Douglas Hofstadter explains, “When a system of ‘meaningless’ symbols has patterns in it that accurately track, or mirror, various phenomena in the world, then that tracking or mirroring imbues the symbols with some degree of meaning – indeed, such tracking or mirroring is no less and no more than what meaning is.”

Of the judge, McCarthy tells us, “Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledger books must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin … and will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.”

For as Saussure remarked, “It is quite illusory to believe that where language is concerned the problem of origins is any different from the problem of permanent conditions. There is no way out of the circle.”