Tracking Blood Meridian: Violence, Landscape + Material Poiesis

This doctoral thesis in Architecture by Design develops new spatial and material understandings of a textual site – Cormac McCarthy’s enigmatic 1985 novel Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. Characterised by its unyielding depiction of violence, the novel chronicles the barbaric acts of a band of scalphunters – the Glanton Gang – as they rove across the American frontier. While on the one hand, the book is a remarkable counter-mapping of the historical and mythical narratives foundational to the United States, it is also a distinct vision of the desert as a phantasmic environment of violent latencies. Meditating on the production of these presences, both in the text and the ‘real’ terrain it describes, the research critiques McCarthy’s own spatial understandings and practices, while forming a constellated reading of Blood Meridian within an array of literature, history, culture, and mythology.

Operating in the methodological role of a tracker, the study imagines the novel as a paracartographic surface marked with traces and remainders that provide rich material for examining McCarthy’s vision of the American borderlands. Specifically, this ‘by Design’ research carefully examines literary and topographical descriptions – tilling for clues in the naming of chapters, the phonologies of place-names, and the archetypal characters of the novel. The approach is to draw-out from McCarthy’s writing, moving between textual and visual registers to construct readings of these qualities, while making the argument that these places and landscapes can be understood as both distinct geographical sites and complex psycho-spatial settings. In this way, the study extends critical readings of McCarthy’s oeuvre in to and out from the field of design, develops new understandings of the spatial rebuses of his writing, and provokes disciplinary interruptions within the established research traditions of McCarthy scholarship. 

In forming a material imagination with which to think about violence and landscape, the research engages a number of design devices that range from re-interpretations of the death mask and the raft to speculative critiques of architectural typologies such as the bathhouse and war memorial. These devices are used as thought-images to apprehend new sets of relationships between violence, the Glanton Gang, and the body in landscape. Elaborated under three thematic folds – drawing-as-violence, paranoid space, and violent atmospheres – the research offers new inter-textual readings of Blood Meridian when held against a number of real and fictional sites: from the historicity of porcelain and recipes for gunpowder to the Nevada Test Site and the ancient ruins of Pueblo Bonito, from the Trinity Bomb Test and the land art of Walter De Maria to troublesome clouds of dust and the reticent quality of McCarthy’s archive in Texas. The research questions the unusual, anachronic atmospheres of such settings to establish the thesis within the mingled ecology of violence and landscape. It foregrounds specific kinds of mark-making as inaugural acts of violence, examines the ‘rim’ as a distinct type of paranoid horizon condition, distinguishes the spatialities and blindspots of ‘the head,’ and meditates on atmospheric disturbances particular to the American frontier terrain.