A Breakdown of the Judge

Masters, Joshua J. “‘Witness to the Uttermost Edge of the World’: Judge Holden’s Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian." Critique; Fall 1998. 25-37

This article by Joshua Masters is an in-depth analysis of the judge and his role as a character who controls words and thus forms his own reality, and also the kid’s relationship to the judge as the only person who threatens the judge’s dominion of war. He has broken his analysis into three different parts with each one explaining the judge on a different level. The first section explores “the multidimensional facets of the judge’s protean character. Although attempts to schematize the judge will inevitably contain him within boundaries that his complex character resists, I consider him in the roles of trickster, ethnographer, and Adam. Each of those roles accentuates an aspect of the judge’s efficacious textuality: his play with words, his ability to interpret, and his capacity to name(25-26)". Masters then goes on to explain the judge as he sees him, in those particular roles as a master of words. In the second section he studies “the function and effect of the judge’s text-making roles; as an author, he is also an expunger. Traditionally, the landscape of the Frontier has been conceived as a void waiting to be filled, as a tablet awaiting inscription, and as a world of broken language requiring order. In the judge, we see the violence of authorship, for the act of inscription implies a simultaneous erasure of an existent text(26)". In section two Masters basically describes the judge’s ability to see the future and mold it into whatever he wants through his use of words. The judge convinces characters throughout the book to follow him and they do, and together they do terrible things all because the judge orders it to be so. Finally, Masters’ third section regarding the judge deals with “the kid’s role in the judge’s entrepreneurial pursuits; the kid’s moral impulse constitutes the only threat to the judge’s logos. Although that impulse suggests an innate human characteristic that transcends the judge’s text, its inability to redefine or even disrupt that text suggests its impotence(26)". In the final section Masters describes the kid as an indication of some “moral possibility existing outside the judge’s ego (33)” and because of his unwillingness to give himself to the work (war and violence) of the gang he successfully disrupts the judge’s order; if only for a short while.

This is resource is invaluable to extending the readers understanding of the judge’s character, how powerful he really is, and his relationship and conflict with the kid. Masters does an incredible job of simply describing what he views as the judge’s different roles within Blood Meridian and how this understanding can shed light on violence that is caused by the kid’s refusal to accept war as his god. This idea of the judge as a master of words, a person so gifted that he can manipulate and mold reality in the eyes of others to become whatever he desires is vital to understanding his relationship with the kid and the narrator. The points made by Masters cause the reader to question the reality of what the judge says, how the kid disagrees with him, and how the narrator disagrees if not explicitly. For example when dealing with the judge’s role of text-maker Masters says; “The judge’s ability to transform chaos into order stems from his textualization of the universe. He alone controls historical intentionality; he alone controle the meaning behind words, and he alone controls their application(30)". The judge’s character is really one must be understood, at least in part, in order for the true conflict in Blood Meridian to become more distinct, and thus the roles and rhetoric of the judge, narrator, and kid can be connected and understood as well.