Illegibility, Performativity, and Interpretive Grace: Attending to Evil in Blood Meridian

The Christian tradition is called to develop more robust and sensitive ways to approach evil as an enduring locus of theological indefinition and inadequacy. This essay takes up this task by reading of Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, which depicts human cruelty without clarifying whether these representations function within a larger thematic structure; most scholars interpret the novel as amoral or nihilistic. I demonstrate the inverse: that Blood Meridian’s profound moral-theological vision is founded upon its commitment to evil’s illegibility. By highlighting its close intertextual relationship with the Book of Job, and the performative function of the novel’s interpretive difficulty as a mirror of the ethical-spiritual struggle for an orientation towards evil amidst divine absence, I argue that McCarthy follows Job in affirming that theodicy cannot be realized as a rational proposition, but it can be literally realized, made real, in practice.