Struggling toward Empathic Witness in Blood Meridian

Abstract: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is often understood as a novel whose externalist narration, reprehensible characters, and extreme violence reject empathy. This essay draws on cognitive literary studies to argue that, rather than rejecting empathy, Blood Meridian strains productively against normative relationships between reader, novel, and empathy, relationships typically defined by comfort or seduction, to call readers to practice difficult empathy. By leaving characters' minds unnarrated, the novel creates a barrier to easy empathy and an opportunity for ambiguous, effortful empathic imagining. This externalist narration works in concert with the novel's conception of witnessing, which asserts the ethical stakes of attending to others' inner lives by suggesting that witnessing others with empathy enables one to "poison" Judge Holden's enterprise of violence. Embracing the novel's invitation to empathic witness equips readers to testify to the value of others' lives and to empathy's enduring ethical potential amid a culture of exploitation and war.