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.

The Violence Provides Insight

Eddins, Dwight. “‘Everything a Hunter and Everything Hunted’: Schopenhaur and Cormac
McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Critique Fall 2003: 25-33.

Dwight Eddins like so many other critics uses the violence found within Blood Meridian to shed light onto it’s characters and the relationship that they share. But in order for him to explain the unique relationships shared by McCarthy’s charters Eddins first strives to explain the nature of the violence, and comes to the conclusion that “From the beginning, Cormac McCarthy has been a master practitioner of this calculated estrangement. He dramatizes the seemingly inhuman extremes of the human condition and amid the seemingly unnatural presentness of natural landscapes even as he questions the very possibility of reconciling these discrepancies into a coherent picture(25)". Eddins’ describes the violence in Blood Meridian as something that is not unusual to the characters because it is something that, for them, has always been and will probably always be. He makes an argument based on this understanding that attributes many of the character’s problems to this world of mindless violence and how they have been forced to react to it.

The violence depicted in Blood Meridian is just as important to understanding the judge, the kid, and the narrator as anything they will say throughout the book. Understanding the violence means understanding their world, as it is plagued with violence. Thus in order to truly understand anything the judge, the kid, or the narrator says the reader must first consider the world’s effects on everything they do. For example the judge’s view that “war is God” can be seen as him detaching his emotions and rationalizing the violence around him. Eddins’ offers this view of the judge; “Only the judge among the riders actually occupies this detached aesthetic plateau vis-a-vis the unremitting violence of their existence; . . . The judge on the other hand, construes the perpetual warfare of existence alternately as an exhilarating game-. . . - and as a dance enjoyed by those who have delivered themselves ‘entire to the blood of war’(McCarthy 331)(31)". Furthermore the violence is another great aspect of how these characters are related as it seems to be the one thing that is unanimous to all of them. All the characters must deal with it and respond to it, and thus they are all inter connected. Eddins’ interpretation of the violence in Blood Meridian, and his explanation of it’s importance to every aspect of the book can provide an in-depth understanding of the world within which these characters really live. And by understanding their world the reader can begin to understand them.

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.

Reader Sympathy: The Kid, the Narrator, and the Reader

Kiefer, Christian. "Unneighborly Behavior: Blood Meridian, Lonesome Dove and the Problem of Reader Sympathy." Southwestern American Literature 33.1 (Fall 2007), 39-52.

Kiefer takes a look at the folly of familiarity suggested by Blood Meridian in the context of the popular Western novel, specifically Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove. Both novels were published in 1985 and both incorporate the same terrain and similar tribes of Indians (and the prequels to Lonesome Dove even involve the same time period and mention the mercenary scalp-hunting), and Kiefer proposes that considering these similarities in juxtaposition with the the unique thematic concerns and vastly different narrative styles of the novels presents an interesting study in reader sympathy in relation to the Western. Kiefer is especially interested in discussing the subtly of the differences between Blood Meridian and Lonesome Dove in relation to the reader's experience in order to illuminate the different perspectives on the past and present that both novels represent. Identifying the moral basis of the heroic Western as appealing to reader sympathy (as supported by Lonesome Dove's commercial success compared to that of Blood Meridian), Kiefer examines the ways in which McCarthy uses and alters such Western idioms as morally justified and restrained violence to challenge reader sympathy. Kiefer quotes from the two works and compares the level of conscious reflection of the characters as well as the different approaches to similar conflicts (such as those between rangers and those between a protagonist and a barkeeper). Kiefer sees Blood Meridian's violence as "a violence, in the end, that appears to teach nothing, that imparts no message, other than that violence itself is the great and terrible solution to all, that it is a constant in the affairs of men, and that any act that is not inherently violent is perhaps no true act at all. (42). By exploiting the modern reader's expectations of "stock characters" of history that popular culture (of which Lonesome Dove is an example) has provided, McCarthy encourages a rethinking of not just literary conventions but historical conventions as well; Kiefer proposes that the challenge to reader sympathy in Blood Meridian "necessitates the construction of a new interpretive system" (49) while even criticizing such systems by criticizing itself.

Though many critics have asserted that Blood Meridian is an atypical Western, and cannot in fact be reduced to genre writing at all, the suspended disbelief or disregard for the popular genre in Kiefer's analysis invites a ground-level examination of what is involved in the reader-novel relationship. If characters "who attempt to act with morality tend to be met with death or horror, and what God exists...seems vacant at best or malevolent at worst" (41), the traditional sensitivity or development of understanding of value system that a reader might expect to experience (in a protagonist or anti-hero figure) is thwarted. The kid's violence and the lack of insight into his psyche by the time his first unconscionably violent encounters are described do not allow the reader to forge expected relationships with the text, and are forced to reconsider what the narrator's treatment requires of his audience. The reader must follow the kid's actions and thus engage in a kind of bloody pilgrimage whose direction and reasoning is not self-evident. The lack of binary oppositions in the novel are also identified by Kiefer as challenging reader sympathy, because taking sides is a challenge. The simultaneous alienation and alignment encouraged by the narrator's treatment of the kid illuminates the way that Blood Meridian prompts the reader to consider ethical questions about understanding the past and the possibility of choosing a "good" or "better" path. Kiefer also points out that the narrator has a high degree of self-consciousness, and that the judge is symptomatic of the "anti-text" that the novel also contains (50) as revealed, for example, when he proclaims that “men’s memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not” (Blood Meridian 330). If the judge is an aspect of the narrator's own uncertainty, the instability of familiarity and authority becomes an even more fundamental issue of the narrative.

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.