Itinerant Skins: Mark-making in Blood Meridian

This paper explores mark-making in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian by reading the characters of the Glanton Gang in relation to an ‘Architecture by Design’ PhD project – Gang Archaeologies. In examining the mark as a type of primal violence, the specific reading the paper develops is constructed around a close study of spatial and atmospheric traces in the novel as a condition for creative research. Specifically, the paper reflects on how such marks come to constitute a para-cartographic device within the space of the text, which is to say, they act as signifiers (or clues) for the way ‘character’ – in every sense of the word – is deployed by McCarthy. Moreover, and in relation to the open space of an unfolding doctoral thesis, this positioning describes the emergence of tracker-like or proto-detective methodological practices which till both text and landscape for clues.

Drawing on Steven Connor’s Book of Skin and his identification therein of the innate capacity of human skin to receive marks, the paper attempts to explicate the spatial and typographic complexities residing within McCarthy’s text – examining how certain characters become constituted – particularly those
considered to exhibit the marks of the law and writing on the body. Meditating on this type of production, the paper attempts new readings of Blood Meridian when held against James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as deduced by Jennifer Bloomer and Hélène Cixous. In doing so, it questions a ‘cryptic’ quality in McCarthy’s writing, occurrences of disfigured skin, and general depictions of landscape exerting a presence on the bodies of its occupants. Concurrently, the paper seeks to develop new potentials for drawn and constructed research objects, and thusly elaborate the role of architectural methods in literary fields.