Searching through Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, I came across what I think was Cormac McCarthy himself giving a sly hint to the origin of the book… at the very meridian of the story.
***SPOILER ALERT***
I was looking at John Sepich’s website at these two notes on Blood Meridian as a palindrome, the first an essay by Christopher Forbis, and the second a brief response by John Sepich:
http://www.johnsepich.com/documents/palindrome.pdf
http://www.johnsepich.com/documents/palindrome_letter.pdf
Most folks catch that the Leonid meteor showers accompany the kid’s birth and the man’s death to bookend the story, but Christopher Forbis makes a compelling case that numerous other pairings exist throughout the book. He explains, “By way of method, 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 (all copies of the novel, Random House, Ecco Press, Modern Library, Vintage Random, have identical pages). McCarthy wrote the novel but did not lay out the printed copy: these mirrors are allowed within two pages of any exact match.” Forbis lays out more than forty such palindromic pairings throughout Blood Meridian.
***(I used a Vintage International printing from May 1992 with 351 pages.)***
Some of these pairings are perhaps a bit specious; they remind me of friends who searched for synchronicities in Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon when played as the soundtrack for The Wizard of Oz. (The trick is to start the album at the 3rd roar of the lion before the opening credits)
Of course, half the fun was not knowing for sure if the boys from Pink Floyd did it on purpose or if it was all a giant coincidence. While I think many of the connections my friends saw were imagined, I have to agree that many of the ‘coincidences’ were quite striking.
So I decided to dig in to see if I could find some more of these ‘mirror pairings.’ I took the number of pages in my copy of Blood Meridian and divided by two to get 175.5. I flipped to pages 175-176, and this sentence practically leapt off the 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.” (Page 176, Blood Meridian, my emphasis).
As John Sepich explains in his Notes on Blood Meridian, “though the novel is presented as a life of McCarthy’s otherwise nameless ‘kid,’ historical accounts of the Glanton gang are the backbone of the book. Decorated Union Army general Samuel Chamberlain’s narrative My Confession provides McCarthy with his core Glanton tales and the historical basis for his essential character Judge Holden.” (Page 1, Notes on Blood Meridian)
In A Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian, Shane Shimpf makes the bold claim that, “Blood Meridian is a meditation on a Nietzschean world where God has died. McCarthy has given us a hell on earth where there is no God; everything is in a state of chaos and steady decline both physically and morally. The point is to demonstrate how traditional religion, in the form of Christianity, has become stagnant and ineffectual, incapable of providing any sanctuary for those who seek it in times of crisis. What does flourish, however, is the transforming power of science and technology as embodied in the person of the Judge,” who proclaims, “Man’s meridian is at once his darkening. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. …do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.” (Page 153, Blood Meridian). McCarthy here alludes to both the cyclical nature of war, and his tale. Then at the very meridian of his novel, Cormac McCarthy has slyly ‘confessed’ to lifting the backbone of Blood Meridian from Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confessions, the text ‘seeing to every need’ McCarthy might have for the framework of his story.
After the order is given to the governor’s chamberlain, the gang appears, and last to appear is the Judge, clad in an outfit expertly stitched together.“Whole bolts of cloth exhausted and squads of tailors as well in that fabrication. His feet were encased in nicely polished gray kid boots and in his hand he held a panama hat that had been spliced together from two such lesser hats by such painstaking work that the joinery did scarcely show at all.”
Christopher Forbis speculates, “At the gang’s return as heroes to Chihuahua City to be paid in gold, that Judge Holden enters Governor Trias’ banquet carrying such a perfectly-spliced hat, the judge’s hat is metaphorically the novel, and this is the gang’s—the kid’s—meridian, a highest-status moment.” (Forbis, 6)
If the world of Blood Meridian is one in which God is dead and science has triumphed, the expertly-spliced hat crowns the most scientific character in the book: The Judge.
In addition to Samuel Chamberlain’s narrative, McCarthy used snippets of hundreds of books to weave his tale. McCarthy himself told an interviewer for the New York Times, “The ugly truth is that books are made out of books.” The Judge’s hat is made out of hats.