The Bedrock of the Judge

Josyph, Peter. “Tragic Ecstasy: A Conversation with Harold Bloom on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Southwestern American Literature. 26.1 (fall 2000): 7-20

In Peter Josyph’s conversation with Harold Bloom about Blood Meridian, Bloom discusses many aspects of the novel, emphasizing the power and originality of the narrative despite McCarthy’s indebtedness to other great American authors and to Shakespeare, the violence, the unanswered nature of the mysteries presented in the narrative, and the fallacies of some common interpretations of the kid, the judge, and the epilogue. Bloom says that the “controlled landscape” and “the Judge’s rhetoric” are the novel’s two great components, in addition to the “mad trajectory” of the plot and the final interaction between the kid and the judge (11-12). Bloom identifies the judge as “an astonishing rhetorician, the ablest in all of American literature” (11), and identifies the astonishing subtlety of the narrator’s handling of the kid’s subversion of the judge via his terseness as well as the elusive physical presence within the narrative. “McCarthy doesn’t want to show you what is developing in [the kid]” (12) for dramatic and thematic reasons, and he “does not want us to identify with him” (13) because the more important consideration than the kid’s personal journey is the significance of the kid to the judge, which is a puzzle that is not resolved by the narrator. The judge “bears out” the interpretation that he accuses the kid of not acknowledging what he is at heart (the same as the judge), but he “transcends it” (13). Because of the prophetic nature of the judge and the perseverance of the judge’s philosophy, Bloom sees a negative transcendence in the novel though there is possible transcendence of “the darkness” through the man in the epilogue who Bloom sees as a Promethean figure who may challenge the judge (16). Whether or not the judge can be challenged, Bloom sees him as the unabsorbable “bedrock” of the narrative because he never ceases to “fascinate you and horrify you” (19). Bloom also maintains that the novel as a whole transcends any allegory of the American West by remaining “a very individualized mode of perceiving carnage” and that the “total conception of the book” which “conceives of itself mystically” is what renders it so difficult to enjoy and understand and impossible to pin down.

Bloom’s interpretation of the judge as the indomitable force in Blood Meridian endows him with more agency and inexhaustible power as a figure in literature (not just in the plot of the narrative) than any other character in the book and even more than the consciousness of the narrator. If he is “the real bedrock of McCarthy’s genius” (19), and the narrator is also an aspect of this genius, then the narrator is a function or another spawn larval to the judge rather than the other way around. Whether or not Bloom intends to suggest that the judge encompasses the narrative, the judge’s relationship to the reader is identified as one of unceasing, awesome power, even after repeated readings. Bloom emphasizes the significance of the relationship between the kid and the judge but also suggests that this significance is not completely knowable by the reader, perhaps implying that the reader must form his own relationship with and stance toward the judge, especially if the kid is not meant to be sympathized with but only admired (13). Because Bloom emphasizes the challenging uncertainties inherent in the narrative, it is significant that the relationships between the narrator and judge, kid and judge, and the narrator and the reader are not completely reckonable. He proposes that each new awareness of the impact of the judge on the reader is all that is really knowable, and that this will inform the approach to the significance of the narrative as a whole.