Artem YudinSlavic R5A SP14April 1, 2014 “Blood Meridian” as “anti-Western” In a sense, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is a book about the West; it's just a book that bridges that gap between the "old" mythology and the "new" traditional revisionist western and creates a whole new direction for the genre to follow with that of a more practical mythos. It works by using and inverting various classic tasks of the Western cliché and sets them with themes and issues related to modern traditional interpretations of the West, generating an entirely new type of Western. The novel follows a teenage runaway from home with a sort of disposition destined for violence, known only as "the Child", born in Tennessee during the famous Leonid meteor showers of 1833. In the late 1840s, he meets for the first time a tall and absolutely hairless personality, Judge Holden, for a religious resurrection in Nacogdoches, Texas. There, Holden shows his darkest nature by falsely accusing a preacher of raping both a little girl and a goat, inciting those attending the revival to physically beat and kill the preacher. It is a critique of the process by which "history," (the textual representation of previous events through which thematic routine and meaning are unnaturally imposed) is created and continually recreated to install the hegemonic ethnic narrative. The character of Judge Holden is merely an instrument through which McCarthy indicates to us the subjective nature of the heritage documentation process and how it could be misused. In the context of Western national historiography, McCarthy contains a mirror of both the "old" and the "new...... middle of paper...... memory" in this way fails to writer in Blood Meridian, and then it's because of your lack of history at the historical moment in which he produces the story. Blood Meridian is not simply Western, nor anti-Western. It is “a kind of overcoming of the limits of contemporary artistic practice, a push against the barriers of the mode of intellectual production in which McCarthy feels situated. This western, being a genre, only serves to be a relevant topic or venue for McCarthy's broader discussion of history, as in spheres relating to academia and pop culture; the West is a historically bound space that is being deconstructed and reinterpreted to fit a whole new American ethnic identity.