bakhtin and mccarthy in dialogue blood meridian: a generic polyphony

The genre of cormac mccarthy s blood meridian has been the subject of debate for decades. scholars render it western, frontier romance, historical fiction, and epic, albeit the attributions are taken for granted since there is no transparent study regarding its genre. according to the adventurous soul of its protagonist, the kid flees from his hometown; he seeks violence throughout the narrative only to discover himself fatally alone at the heart of the mexican border. bereft of ulterior motifs, the kid follows a scalp-hunter filibuster gang in search of indigenous apaches; the kid encounters a semi-miltonian devil, judge holden, who aims to take control of the world by rape and murder. all the descriptions above explicate some of the characteristics of the genres pertaining to blood meridian. nonetheless, the stakes with respect to blood meridian s genre classification are high since adopting a specific genre to it risks misleading interpretations, thus leaving the reader unassured of the book s significance. reflecting on how mikhail bakhtin s seminal piece concerning epic and novel, and georg lukacs essay on the novel forms, reconfigure the concept of genre and its development given the historical and political conditions of various epochs, this study aims at reevaluating the genre of blood meridian as a bakhtinian novel in the process of ongoing development. the paper concludes that the bakhtinian novel is the emblem of the all-embracing genres, and blood meridian qualifies bakhtin s approach.