Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985)
This Digital Map features in the paper Blood Meridian’s Chronotopic Gates: Reading Cormac McCarthy through the Lens of a Literary-Historical GIS, published in the October 2023 edition of the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing.
Click to Access Blood Meridian Interactive Map
Best Viewed in Google Chrome
In his novel Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy traces the trek of its titular character known simply as the ‘Kid.’ The novel opens in 1833 with the Kid’s birth in Tennessee, and travels rapidly to 1849 and when he enlists as a prisoner in Chihuahua City, with a band of scalp-hunters who wreak havoc over the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. Fleeing to American in 1850, Glanton and most members of the gang are killed by the Yuma at a ferry crossing Colorado River between new U.S., New Mexico and California Territories. Blood Meridian’s finale telescopes to 1878 and the Kid’s (now given the appellation of the ‘Man’) murder by Judge Holden in a tavern privy at Fort Griffin on the north Texas plains.
McCarthy, an Irish-American, was born in Tennessee, but migrated to the U.S. southwest to research and write Blood Meridian. Described as a “nomadic wanderer” and “lucid cartographer of inescapable delirium,” (1) McCarthy is writer who displays a “predilection for building his works of fiction on locales in the real world.” (2)
Blood Meridian adopts and re-imagines the historical figures of Glanton and Holden from Samuel E. Chamberlain’s Mexican-American War memoir My Confession: The Recollection of a Rogue, first published in 1956. McCarthy in an approximation of Carl Sauer’s Berkeley School of Cultural Geography fieldwork practices in southwest America and northern Mexico “traveled by auto and on horseback through much of the territory” of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Chihuahua and Sonora “following the trail of Glanton’s gang as best he could.” (3)
Blood Meridian Spatial Synopsis
Bloomsday Map
Bloomsday falls annually on 16 June Dublin, Ireland, in celebration of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922). Inaugurated in 1954 by Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan), Patrick Kavanagh, Anthony Cronin, John Ryan and Tom Joyce. The interactive map below, is based on the schema Joyce created for his Italian translator Carlo Linati to explain the episodes in Ulysses. The novel is set in Dublin, Ireland over the course of the day on 16 June 1904, and follows the separate paths of ad-man Leopold Bloom, and student Stephen Dedalus (from the Martello Tower in Sandycove, south Dublin) until they finally meet in Nighttown. The pair then repair to the garden of Bloom’s house at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin’s northside where they view a “heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”
Deep Chart GIS (2020)
A morphology of cartographic representation of the Grand Banks fishery between 1504 and 1831.
C.J. Visscher’s Thamescape map of London, 1616, and Distance-Decay graph of locational influences on William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (1610-1611)
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922): A Deep Map GIS (2015)
Visual Geo-Literary and Historical Analysis, Tweetflickrtubing, and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) (Methods, Models, and Geographic Information Sciences section) Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Volume 105, Issue 5. (2015): 927-950
Flann OBrien’s Psychogeographical GIS of 1930s Dublin (2013-2014)
Transcending the Cube: Translating GIScience Time and Space Perspectives in a Humanities GIS. Special Issue on Space-Time Research in GIScience, International Journal of Geographical Information Science (IJGIS) Volume 28, Issue 5, (2014): 149-1164
From the Ruins of Time and Space: The Psychogeographical GIS of Dublin in Flann O’Brien’s At Swim Two Birds (1939.) City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. Volume 17, Issue 2, (2013): 209-233
William Petty’s Cartesian Hermeneutic: The Hiberniae Delineatio (1685)
A short overview of William Petty’s Seventeenth Century ‘GIS”
Counties Down, Antrim and Rathlin Island
‘A General Mapp of Ireland‘
Questions? Contact Charles Travis (charles.travis@uta.edu)