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.

A General Analysis Provides Insight Into Characters

Bowers, James. Reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Boise State University Press, 1999.

This book is simply James Bowers’ explanations and simple interpretations of the characters and situations found within Blood Meridian. He makes no claim to any central idea for his book, and it seems that he follows the journey a reader might only having more information on hand. Of McCarthy Bowers says; “McCarthy’s narrative constants include the vanishing rural South, the dad-to-day struggle for existence, a world bereft of redemption, and the primacy of nature. A fascination with primal energies leads him to suffuse his work with crime and violent death(6)". Bowers divides his reading into sections that include: A Re-Envisioning the West:A Residue of Nameless Rage, The Kid, the Judge, and a “Taste for Mindless Violence”, Glanton, Holden, and the “Formal Agenda of an Absolute Destiny”, The Yuma Massacre: “A Ritual Includes the Letting of Blood”, and Conclusion. This work as a whole has no central argument, it simply makes observations as the reading through Blood Meridian progresses.

While no central argument exists within this book many points are made by James Bowers that can be used to understand the nature of the characters, their philosophies, and their relationships with each other. Furthermore Bowers emphasizes at the beginning that understanding the history of the taming of the west can help to shed light on McCarthy’s rendering of that history and the characters he placed within it. Of this history Bowers says; “The primary fiction of the American frontier - that freedom and individualism is gained by going west - is reduced to existential nothingness. The wilderness, rather than granting spiritual purification, renders characters demonic. Violence does not regenerate but warps the human heart(8)". He suggests that the violence experienced by the characters can be an explanation for their twisted morals and values, and the prevalence of this violence is what leads the judge to believe that war is inevitable and must therefore be embraced. Regarding this violence and how important it is to understanding the characters of Blood Meridian, Bowers explains the relationship between the kid and judge as this; “And because the kid finally refuses to worship this deity, the novel’s central relationship, that between the kid and the judge, concludes with a mortal judgement(12)". Bowers even makes mention of the judge’s mastery of words and the fact that this skill allows him to control and create his own end. The judge’s doctrine is surmised as “words master meaning - the jargon of the legal profession, commerce, and Manifest Destiny need to be fathomed in order to hold ‘authority’ and be heeded. But with the exception of Tobin, and perhaps the mature kid at novel’s end, all McCarthy’s characters are enslaved by the power of words(27)". The importance of understanding the kid or the judge and their relationship is just as important as understanding their different rhetorical styles, especially when approaching the ethical significance of their interwoven relationships with the narrator and the reader.

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.

The Unreckonable Narrator

Phillips, Dana. “History and the Ugly Facts of Blood Meridian.” Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Ed. James D. Lilley. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. 18-46.

Because McCarthy’s statement that “books are made out of books” is his only comment on the placement of Blood Meridian in the continuum of literary history, Phillips proposes that the critical reader must examine what books Blood Meridian is made out of as well as the novel’s form and point of view in order to discern its vision and effect. Phillips finds that an examination of sources (such as Mexican-American history, or the history of John Joel Glanton, as well as Moby Dick) reveals that Blood Meridian is not “a pastiche of sources” (21), and he uses Georg Lukács’ theories on “philosophy of composition” to properly “historicize” the novel (21). Phillips seeks to identify the relationship between the implied philosophy of history that Blood Meridian proposes and its philosophy of composition (22), proposing that through the “optical democracy” (as taken from the “optical democracy” passage in the novel as well as several other instances in which Phillips sees humans described with equal or less significance than their surroundings) of the narration in which knowledge accrues instead of developing (28) and the landscape is represented as more potent or at least as “putatively factual” as the characters, McCarthy presents a vision of the world as dominated by natural history and geological forces connected to vast time and space which preclude the significance of the individual and the human in general, including all attempts at meaning-making (37). Phillips proposes that the narrative is “nonhuman” rather than “inhuman” (37), “alien, but not alienated” (37) in its virtuous “equanimity of tone” which is authoritative, final, and shows “psychology, morality, and politics” as “mere languages” and figurative language as merely a means of magnifying intensity rather than suggesting symbolic or hidden meanings (36). Phillips supports this interpretation by emphasizing Blood Meridian’s powerful narrative despite its disregard for Lukács’ emphasis on character and plot and engagement with history which are the traditional terms of literary effectiveness: he claims that it is self-evident that the narrator has no insight into the psyche of the characters, that none of the characters possess “a sense of himself” (30), and that the similarities between Moby Dick and Blood Meridian highlight the way in which McCarthy reconfigures character by avoiding the self-consciousness of Ishmael and instead constructing characters “as language, as suggestive artifact or trace of the human” (25). Finally, the absence of Lukácsian narration combined with the narrator’s epic resonance via preoccupation with natural/geological history presents a worldview that whatever values exist are on a large and unknowable scale and that even the present is, as Phillips borrows from Blood Meridian, “a time before nomenclature” (39).

Phillips’ focus on the un-preferential tone of the narrator and the lack of relevance of character to the overall “philosophy of history” that he finds central to Blood Meridian aligns the reader with the kid as an individual faced with an impersonal and unconscious but nonetheless incredibly powerful universe. Though Phillips does not conceive of the narrator as a conscious entity or knower, the voice of the narrator (which Philips often characterizes as McCarthy’s voice) interacts authoritatively with the reader by challenging the reader’s expectations of plot and character and by confronting the reader with violence and death as the “more or less objective truths of all human experience” (24) rather than offering any kind of redemptive vision, or even a world in which personal vision or transcendence matters (because it is impossible). The refusal of the possibility of transcendence with which the narrator confronts the reader is similar to the overwhelming nature of the judge’s declaration that a man’s destiny “is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well” (Blood Meridian 330). But even the voice of the judge, which as Phillips acknowledges “seems to be in implicit dialogue with the impersonal, highly detailed, and verbally ingenious narration” (26), does not reveal the judge’s inner life or character, an assertion that Phillips supports by emphasizing the theatrical nature of the judge’s “ventilations” (27). Because the judge is not a traditional character, his speeches cannot be conflated with the voice of the author or narrator and are thus not granted the expansive authority of vision which the narrator possesses. The absence of any real examination of character reveals that the narrator is not in fact a knower or “meta-character” but rather a body of knowledge that guides the reader in an exploration of “liminal concerns” such as the impossibility of the privilege of humans in relation to the rest of the world (28). Although Phillips conception of the “optical democracy” of the entire narrative only addresses one aspect of the narrative’s disturbing power and vision, it does draw attention the ways in which the judge is not necessarily more powerful than the kid, that the judge’s rhetoric does not necessarily convey truth in the same way that the more negative and impersonal narrator does.