Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) resists or problematizes many of the literary categories that frequently organize our reading: modern or postmodern, Western novel or Southern novel, national allegory or historical metafiction or apocalyptic thriller. I propose an alternative to such categories of genre, movement, or literary genealogy—reading the novel as a self-conscious, narrative working-through of a literary-philosophical problem. The concept that Blood Meridian continually circles without fully resolving, I suggest, is a problematic ontology of violence, problematic because it appears to assert both the utter contingency of human existence and the absolute self-determination of human will. Historicist, aesthetic, or political readings of the novel that fail to address this problem will always be unsatisfactory. I offer what I call a speculative reading which moves this problem to the center of the text, and examines the text’s attempts to resolve it.

中文翻译：

---

我们的知识被迫回去：推测误读和血脉的身份

Cormac McCarthy 的 Blood Meridian (1985) 抵制或质疑许多经常组织我们阅读的文学类别：现代或后现代、西方小说或南方小说、民族寓言或历史元小说或世界末日惊悚片。我提出了一种替代这些类型、运动或文学谱系的方法——将小说阅读为文学哲学问题的自我意识、叙事性工作。我认为，血液子午线在没有完全解决的情况下不断循环的概念是一种有问题的暴力本体论，这是有问题的，因为它似乎既主张人类存在的完全偶然性，又主张人类意志的绝对自主性。未能解决这个问题的小说的历史学家、美学或政治读物总是不能令人满意的。