1. “Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds?”
Fifty years of Cormac McCarthy’s writing in blood
David Harris Deakin University Australia

2. You say…how much blood in Blood Meridian??!

3. Hematocrit

4. Hematocriticism

6. The Orchard Keeper (1965)
Suttree (1979)
No Country for Old Men (2005)
The Road (2006)

7. “Hell, it don’t mean nothing. Blood’s blood
“Hell, it don’t mean nothing. Blood’s blood. It don’t know where it came from” (McCarthy, 2012).
“construed out of blood” (McCarthy, 1994, p. 73).

8. Blood groups Life Impersonal blood & magic Time bleeds Blood without
pain
Blood of country
Human-nonhuman bonds of blood
Sight and
blindess
Humour
Humor?
as tithe,
currency as
food
&
mortar
& violence as natural
& the
moon
philosophy
Blood suckers
Grotesque, Carnival, gothic blood
Tiny
hearts
Love
Paleness, bloodless
Blood
matrix
The fire’s heart
Abjection
as sign of death
Blood
& loyalty
The sacred, religion
And
Silence
Blood & cutting for sign
&
water
The
heart
Sacrifice, ritual
Bloodlines, kin, race, clan
as ‘everyday’
Blood
oaths
as violence done
Blood specialists
and
the sun

10. The blood of the land and the blood of the people

11. “still the rain…ran red and livid as open wounds”

12. “still the rain…ran red and livid as open wounds”
 “It rained and the pond went blood red” / “red world” / “red water puddles” / “mud choked gullies ran thick with water of a violent red”

13. “still the rain…ran red and livid as open wounds”
 “It rained and the pond went blood red” / “red world” / “red water puddles” / “mud choked gullies ran thick with water of a violent red”
“a cardinal shot like a drop of blood”

14. “still the rain…ran red and livid as open wounds”
 “It rained and the pond went blood red” / “red world” / “red water puddles” / “mud choked gullies ran thick with water of a violent red”
“a cardinal shot like a drop of blood”
“opaque as clay” and sluggish, lapping, staining “dark red liquid”

15. “still the rain…ran red and livid as open wounds”
 “It rained and the pond went blood red” / “red world” / “red water puddles” / “mud choked gullies ran thick with water of a violent red”
“a cardinal shot like a drop of blood”
“opaque as clay” and sluggish, lapping, staining “dark red liquid”
“slow bleeding month of October”

16. “still the rain…ran red and livid as open wounds”
 “It rained and the pond went blood red” / “red world” / “red water puddles” / “mud choked gullies ran thick with water of a violent red”
“a cardinal shot like a drop of blood”
“opaque as clay” and sluggish, lapping, staining “dark red liquid”
“slow bleeding month of October”
“red with blood and clay”

17. “still the rain…ran red and livid as open wounds”
 “It rained and the pond went blood red” / “red world” / “red water puddles” / “mud choked gullies ran thick with water of a violent red”
“a cardinal shot like a drop of blood”
“opaque as clay” and sluggish, lapping, staining “dark red liquid”
“slow bleeding month of October”
“red with blood and clay”
“the blood was broken in fine cracks like old dark pottery”

18. Moon
“red moon”, “crooked smile”, “red puddle of moon”, “sliding sodden and gob like”

19. Moon
“red moon”, “crooked smile”, “red puddle of moon”, “sliding sodden and gob like”
Sun
“reddening the western sky”
“running red on the mountain”
“broke between the final shelf of clouds [as though a defence against a force has given way] and bathed for a moment the dripping trees with blood…as if the very air had gone to wine”

20. “that people” of whom “no avatar, no scion, no vestige remains”

22. Blood and the landscape
Blood and fear
Blood and death
City lights and blood
Blood and family, lineage, heredity and clan
Blood and religion
Blood and dreams
Bloodlessness
Blood, fires and hearts

23. A novel of the humors

24. Vomit, excrement, urine, mucous, blood, and various combinations of these, along with mixes of whiskey and beer

25. Vomit, excrement, urine, mucous, blood, and various combinations of these, along with mixes of whiskey and beer
oozing, trickling, welter, pinlets, spewed, poured out, flew, running, slippery, dripping, soaks

26. “Along by the meatcounters shuffling up flies out of the bloodstained sawdust. Where a calf’s head rested pink and scalded on a tray and butchers honed their knives.”
“brick the color of dried blood”

27. “hawking gobbets of spit clogged with dust and blood against the hot iron to sizzle and stink”

28. “He reached into the bottom of the boat and brought up a catfish by the lower jaw…Suttree turned it and sank the point of his knife into its throat and opened its wet and pale blue belly with a clean slicing motion that dumped forth the living viscera down his forearm in a welter of dark blood”

29. “He reached into the bottom of the boat and brought up a catfish by the lower jaw…Suttree turned it and sank the point of his knife into its throat and opened its wet and pale blue belly with a clean slicing motion that dumped forth the living viscera down his forearm in a welter of dark blood”
“This dull and craggy dreamcreature, dark blood draining…slowly pumping gouts of near black blood. The blood ran down over the stones and dripped in the water…trailing blood toward Suttree…Blood dripped and spattered on the stones”

30. “stained and stinking with blood and beer and shit”

31. ‘old distaff Celt’s blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks”

32. “Through a region of ruptured clay ducting and old clay drains and into a dark stone gullet skewered by a jointed cess pipe. Everywhere a liquid dripping, something gone awry in the earth’s organs to which this measured bleeding clocked a constantly eluded doom”
“ribbed palate of a stone monster comatose, a great uvula dripping with rust”

34. Let the bloodletting commence

35. “gurgling and bleeding”
“Strangling on his own blood”
“right carotid artery burst”
“a jet of blood”
“blood bubbled”
“Dried blood black on the ground”
“Blood everywhere”
“a fine spray of dried blood”
“Stains of blood in the clay”
“Blood in the grass”
“blood on the seat”
“Fresh blood everywhere”
“filled with blood”

36. “There was blood on the ground and blood on the rock behind him
“There was blood on the ground and blood on the rock behind him. The blood was still a dark red…He squatted and tried to wipe the blood off the grips on the leg of the man’s trousers but the blood was too well congealed”

37. “had soaked through”

38. “had soaked through”
“you could still see bloodstains in the concrete”

39. “had soaked through”
“you could still see bloodstains in the concrete”
“pumping steadily through his fingers”

40. “had soaked through”
“you could still see bloodstains in the concrete”
“pumping steadily through his fingers”

41. grass, money bills, receipts, boot leather, benches, telephone books, car seats, trousers, concrete, robes, walls, hotel walls, water

42. “You wear out, Ed Tom. All the time you spend tryin to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin out the door. After a while you just try to get a tourniquet on it”

44. The shooting of the road agent
A memory of the boy’s birth
Signs of cannibalism in the landscape
The father’s leg wound
The father’s coughing

45. “taste the blood”,
“taste of blood”,
“a fine mist”,
“bloody phlegm”,
“bloody drool”,
“spitting blood”

46. “pale and naked and translucent…it’s bowels, its beating heart”

47. “pale and naked and translucent…it’s bowels, its beating heart”
“candlecolored skin”, “so white…the skin”

48. “pale and naked and translucent…it’s bowels, its beating heart”
“candlecolored skin”, “so white…the skin”
“become more faint of heart than he had been in years” and his heart is “ashes”

49. “pale and naked and translucent…it’s bowels, its beating heart”
“candlecolored skin”, “so white…the skin”
“become more faint of heart than he had been in years” and his heart is “ashes”
“pale bride”

50. “pale and naked and translucent…it’s bowels, its beating heart”
“candlecolored skin”, “so white…the skin”
“become more faint of heart than he had been in years” and his heart is “ashes”
“pale bride”
“cold to the bone”

51. The cauterized world

52. ‘cauterized terrain’

53. ‘cauterized terrain’
“the bloodcults must have all consumed one another”

54. ‘cauterized terrain’
“the bloodcults must have all consumed one another”
 “dried and shrunken”, “mummied”, “charred”, “gutted and blackening”, with “crozzled hearts”

55. ‘cauterized terrain’
“the bloodcults must have all consumed one another”
 “dried and shrunken”, “mummied”, “charred”, “gutted and blackening”, with “crozzled hearts”
 ‘envacuumed”

56. ‘cauterized terrain’
“the bloodcults must have all consumed one another”
 “dried and shrunken”, “mummied”, “charred”, “gutted and blackening”, with “crozzled hearts”
 ‘envacuumed”
 “shapes of dried blood in the stubble grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had been field-dressed and hauled away”

57. Blood and the survival of fire in the heart

58. “Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind”

59. “Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind”
“The salt wood burned orange and blue in the fire’s heart”

60. “Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind”
“The salt wood burned orange and blue in the fire’s heart”
“the man sat with his arms around the boy trying to warm him”   

61. “Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind”
“The salt wood burned orange and blue in the fire’s heart”
“the man sat with his arms around the boy trying to warm him”   
“dream…He thought perhaps they’d come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own”

62. “Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind”
“The salt wood burned orange and blue in the fire’s heart”
“the man sat with his arms around the boy trying to warm him”   
“dream…He thought perhaps they’d come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own”
“Don’t lose heart”

63. “Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind”
“The salt wood burned orange and blue in the fire’s heart”
“the man sat with his arms around the boy trying to warm him”   
“dream…He thought perhaps they’d come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own”
“Don’t lose heart”
“He held his hand to the thin ribs. Warmth and movement. A heartbeat”
“Waking in terror, feeling for the boy’s heart”

64. Bloodlines

65. Bloodlines Vision: Blood in the eyes Human-nonhuman blood matrices
Bloody-thirsty country
The impersonal force of blood
Blood-family-loyalty
Blood and character
Beating tiny hearts
The heart and its place in the other
Silence and the blood
Men’s blood/women’s blood
Blood technicians/experts
Blood and the sacred
Blood and the sun and moon
Blood and light
Fires, hearts and the pulse
Corporeal opacity: blood and translucence

66. Beating tiny hearts
Silence and the blood
Fires, hearts and the pulse

67. Beating tiny hearts

68. TOK: “held the tiny heart in the palm of his hand, still beating”
Suttree: “pale newts with enormous eyes and held them in his palm and watched their tiny hearts hammer under the blue and visible bones of their thimblesized briskets”
“on the cool floor with their fragile reptiles, their small hearts hammering in the palms of their hands
Blood Meridian: “a man’s heart, dried and blackened…the old man cradled it in his palm”
The Road: “in terror, feeling for the boy’s heart”
“He held his hand to the thin ribs. Warmth and movement. Heartbeat”
“all but translucent”

69. ATPH:
“inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who’s will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who’s will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations and of who’s will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh”

70. Silence and the blood

71. The Road: “it was so quiet they could all but hear their hearts”
TOK: “the old man lay on his back listening to his heart surge under his rib cage, his breath wheening slow and even”
Suttree: “put his hand to his heart where it boomed in the otherwise silence of the wilderness” , “hear the blood running in his body and he could hear the organs working, the lungs falling and collapsing”
Blood Meridian: “There is hardly in the world a waste so barren but some creature will not cry out at night, yet here one was and they listened to their breathing in the dark and cold and they listened to the systole of the rubymeated hearts that hung within them” (‘darkly meated heart’)
The Road: “it was so quiet they could all but hear their hearts”  
NCFOM: “The only thing he could hear was his heart”  
ATPH: “silence in the bay”

72. Fires, hearts and the pulse

73. TOK: “erupted to the heart” , “pine knots…glowed like rubies, veined and pupiled eyes”
Suttree: “the grey flaky ashes when he toed them broke open to an orange heart of burning wood”
The Road: “The salt wood burned orange and blue in the fire’s heart and he sat watching it for a long time” , “Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind”
ATPH: “Rawlins stared long into the red heart of the fire” , “He fanned the coals in the heart of the fire”
Blood Meridian: “long into the embers of the fire”

74. “They made camp on a low bench of land where walls of dry aggregate marked an old river course and they struck up a fire about which they sat in silence, the eyes of the dog and of the idiot and certain other men glowing red as coals in their heads when they turned. The flames sawed in the wind and the embers paled and deepened and paled and deepened like the bloodbeat of some living thing eviscerate upon the ground before them and they watched the fire which does contain within it something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are divided from their origins and exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and the last ever to be”

75. Conclusions

76. “The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink”
(Gleeson, 2012, p. 64),

77. Thank you “What happened to your head? I got hit with a floorbuffer…
Could you not hear it comin?”
(Suttree)
Thank you
Dave Harris

78. Additional Materials

79. TOK: Bloodlines, heredity, loyalty

80. “Bad blood”

82. “learn to stick to your own blood or you ain’t going to have any blood to stick to”

83. McCarthy
“he could feel the old fierce pull of blood in power and despair, the pulse drum of the irrevocable act. And it was done”
Faulkner
“ the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood ”

84. Suttree: A novel of the heart

85. “weather shrunk and loveless” “Barrenness” “winter” “baleful” “paling”
“desolate”
“darkened”
“darker”

86. “the simple human heart within him”

87. ‘dextrocardias”

88. “The heart beneath the breastbone pumping
“The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad’s pulse”
 “hear the blood running in his body and he could hear the organs working, the lungs filling and collapsing”
 “He felt his heart pumping down there under the palm of his hand. Who tells it so?”

89. NCFOM: The architect/technician of blood

90. ‘bloodstained’
“He was pretty bloody an all”
“Getting hurt [Chigurh says]…changed me…my perspective. I’ve moved on, in a way. Some things have fallen into place that were not there before”
“Something we really ain’t never seen before”

91. “He held the arm and turned it and tried to see how badly it was bleeding. If the median artery were severed. He thought not…No pain. Not yet”
“studied the blood on the walk”
“He watched the pulse of the artery in his neck”
“the capillaries break up” “The light receding”
“throbbing like a pump”

92. “he came upon a pig with its head in a bucket…He began to beat the back of the pig’s head…raising bloody weals along the pig’s neck…until the stick broke…He came up with the pig holding it about the waist, the bucket against the side of his face and blood running all down the front of him, hugging it while it kicked and shat…his eye fell on a piece of pipe…he raised the pipe and swung with all his strength. Blood spewed from under the edge of the bucket…the pig’s fearcrazed eye looked up at him…He bashed it again, spattering brains over the ground. It stretched out, trembled and quit”
“its bloody head flopping…A trail of blood…seized one ear and wrested the head up and hacked open the throat. Blood poured out and ran over the dirt…he sliced the pig open and hauled forth the guts…he’d never seen so many…When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and blood-covered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and cursing”

93. Bleeding and obscured vision

94. TOK: ‘bloody vision’
Suttree: “bleeding eyes” , “He could not see…His eyes kept filling up” , “blood running in his eyes”
“candled woodknots shone blood red and incandescent like the eyes of watching fiends”
Blood Meridian: “He had been scalped and the blood was all run down into his eyes” , “little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes”
The Road: “fine mist of blood” , “One of his eyes was burnt shut”
NCFOM: “ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see” , “Blood kept running into his eye” , “Blood kept running into his eyes”
ATPH: “forehead had begun to bleed and the blood was running down alongside his left eye”