ABSTRACT
Roland Barthes described text as “a woven fabric” formed by interlacing threads of the “already written” and the “already read” (159). If Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is viewed as such a “woven fabric,” then McCarthy critics and scholars have spent the past twenty-five years pulling on the loose ends of the garment to untangle its multitude of intertextual relationships. Just the title Blood Meridian alone has spawned a litany of conjecture and debate as to its possible connections to previous and subsequent texts. John Sepich in Notes on Blood Meridian suggests that the title was influenced by a nineteenth-century novel called The Scalp Hunters by Mayne Reid which uses the word “meridian” in its first paragraph (129). Sepich also notes that in 1845 the Commander at Presidio del Norte used two imaginary longitudinal lines (or meridians) to describe “the area of greatest Comanche and Kiowa activities,” that same area being referred to by General Ralph Smith as a “bloody corridor” (129). In A Reader’s Guide to Blood Meridian, Shane Schimpf traces the title to Lord Byron’s poem “Stanzas to the Po” which features the line “My blood is all meridian” (28). Other readers have analyzed possible links with Albert Camus, the Book of Moses, and even the lyrics of a Bob Dylan song (The Official Website of the Cormac McCarthy Society, Forum).
