Interrogative Relationships: Opposition vs. Deconstruction

Holloway, David. "'A False Book is No Book at All': The Ideology of Representation in Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy." Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Rick Wallach. Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 2000. 185-200.

Maintaining that the historical moment of the author as well as the reader does and should limit and shape the reader’s understanding of a work of literature, and defining the moment of the reader in part by the literary criticism written since the publication of the work, Holloway frames his discussion of Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy in an examination of the disparate and often conflicting positions of established McCarthy criticism. Holloway discusses whether or not a synthesis is possible between these positions, connecting the fractured nature of modern criticism to the “millennial eclipse of alternative economic and ideological structures” and thus tying the reading of conflicting response to literature to the fate of writing and culture in general (187). Holloway forges a kind of synthesis of contradictions by suggesting that contradiction is essential to McCarthy’s work, and though he looks at four of McCarthy’s novels, his examination of the Judge’s language in Blood Meridian suggests that McCarthy uses (even steals) for rhetorical, revisionist purposes and thus cannot be relied upon to be straight-forward or to imply singular meaning. Holloway identifies Holden’s control of the Glanton Gang as “the expropriation and exclusion of meaning” (193), and though McCarthy attempts a “revisionist account of Western American History” as well (192), the Judge is opposed in Blood Meridian. Given this complexity of voice and language and its use and misuse, Holloway asks what the ideology of representation is in the novel (193). Holloway finds that the narrator’s construction of events and the language used to describe them question the “notions of totality, grand narrative, and determinate meaning” by implicitly criticizing manifest destiny and by meditating on the blurring of strict distinctions and binaries. Because binaries are a stabilizing force (here Holloway references The Crossing) and because McCarthy forms an incomplete binary in Blood Meridian by incompletely opposing the judge (who is left as the last one standing) (195), the narrator employs a self-conscious and precarious, even deconstructive rhetoric. Using language only plays into the judge’s hands, so Holloway suggests that the novel cannot avoid the paralysis and falsity which the judge promises all books face (194), though McCarthy’s incomplete opposition to the judge offers the possibility of opposing (and thereby confirming his “intractable presence,” 195) or dismantling the judge but not in defeating him.

Though Holloway refers to McCarthy’s use of language and handling of the judge rather than the narrator’s, his point that Judge Holden reveals or represents the “self-reflexive procedure” of Blood Meridian speaks to the relationship between the rhetoric of the judge and the voice of the narrator (191). The narrator uses the “language with which its own critique is formed” (192), and the judge’s distortion of truth and theatrical use of language present the power and thus the perils of the revisionism that Holloway sees the narrator dabbling in (by presenting a particularly violent and anti-expansionist view of the formation of the United States). Holloway’s discussion of Blood Meridian illustrates the ways in which the narrator and judge are similarly powerful, and while the judge is a more narrow-minded authority in the novel, the narrator is not necessarily a more important voice considering that Holden is the last one standing and dancing at the end of the novel, and even his proclamation that “he will never die” closes the main narrative (335). Holloway’s reading aligns the reader with the kid and the judge with the narrator by identifying that the judge’s victory over the kid (and the seemingly omnipotent narrator either unable or unwilling to pose a solution to the mystery and horror of the judge) leaves the reader questioning the limits of language. The kid’s skepticism (despite his annihilation) is the kind of questioning that the “self-reflexive,” language-obsessed narrator may invite in the reader; an awareness that the rhetorical world of the judge, which is interrogated but not denied by the narrator, is only one world of meaning.