McCarthy, Cormac - Joshua J. Masters (essay date fall 1998)
Joshua J. Masters (essay date fall 1998)
SOURCE: Masters, Joshua J. “‘Witness to the Uttermost Edge of the World’: Judge Holden's Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Critique 40, no. 1 (fall 1998): 25-37.
[In the following essay, Masters views the ambiguous character of Judge Holden as a trailblazer of the Wild West who seeks to fill the moral vacuum of that space with his own brand of “amoral logos.”]
At the center of Cormac McCarthy's epic fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985), we find Judge Holden,1 a Mephistophelean figure who seduces a nomadic horde of scalp hunters into a “terrible covenant” (126), which consigns both their spiritual and physical lives to the judge's jurisdiction. With his “disciples of a new faith” (130), the judge wanders the Mexican-American borderlands like an anti-Moses, a lawgiver who has made no covenant with a higher power, save, of course, war....
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