On Teaching Blood Meridian

Twenty Years of Teaching McCarthy's Masterpiece

I taught Blood Meridian for the first time in the spring of 2001. I was in my PhD program at the University of Denver, teaching an Approaches to Literature class as a TA.

As a whole, students were put off by the ultra-violence of the novel’s first 100 pages. I remember one young woman saying, “Okay, I get it. It’s like, ‘There’s some people over there: let’s kill them.’”

But the mood of the class shifted when we got to Tobin’s story of the Judge’s gunpowder in Chapter X. The students became fascinated by Holden, who began to seduce and horrify them in equal measure.

In 2003, I finished my doctorate and was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. That semester, I taught Blood Meridian in an Intro to Fiction Writing course—the students were not fascinated by Judge Holden at all. They were confused, shocked, repulsed. I decided to pump the breaks on teaching the novel again until the spring of 2005.

That was when Blood Meridian almost lost me my job. I was teaching an American Literature seminar and in addition to using the obligatory Norton Anthology, I decided to teach McCarthy’s novel as an exploration of Manifest Destiny, westward expansion, and the dark, violent impulses of the American past.

I’ve never seen students so reluctant to engage with the book. Though several told me privately that they loved it, the majority of the class did not. On course evaluations, they accused the book of being sexist, racist, and xenophobic; they accused McCarthy of glorifying violence; they questioned the sanity of a professor who would include it on his syllabus.

The issue of my sanity notwithstanding, I was up for reappointment that year, and when the RPT Committee met in the fall, the five professors on that committee were alarmed by what students in that particular course said about me and Blood Meridian. They voted 3 to 2 against my reappointment.

Thankfully, the department chair saw things differently. He reprimanded the committee in his letter to the Dean, saying, “the committee steers a careful, but perilous course,” and stood up for my academic freedom. I was reappointed the next year and then tenured in 2009.

I didn’t teach Blood Meridian again until I taught a Cormac McCarthy seminar and wouldn’t return the book to my curriculum until the fall of 2013.

Something had shifted in the five years I refrained from teaching my favorite novel. The students were much more receptive to McCarthy’s bible of violence and I began to understand that the media they consumed had been greatly influenced by Blood Meridian (I’m thinking of the video game Red Dead Redemption, in particular).

Over the past ten years, I’ve only seen my students embrace McCarthy’s western with even greater alacrity. When I taught the novel in 2022, a student said, “You can step out on the street and feel this atmosphere. It’s in the air.”

Indeed, you can. Not only have films, television, and video games been influenced by Blood Meridian, the violent and chaotic world my students live in has come to resemble McCarthy’s more and more.

This is the disturbing reality we find ourselves in: a world that is blood-drenched, rapacious, slipping into an unfathomable chaos that seems a fit for men like Judge Holden and unfit for anyone else.