the character of Judge Holden inBlood Meridian and sees him as a “Mephistophelean figure who seduces a nomadic horde of scalp hunters into a terrible covenant.” The judge is a metaphor of amoral colonial expansion, symbolic of “the discursive and political practices that defined and created the Frontier.”

Phillips, Dana. “History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” American Literature 68 (June, 1996): 433-460. Phillips finds that categorizing McCarthy’s novel in terms of period and genre is difficult because it fails to fit into the character of a historical novel as defined by Georg Lukacs in his essay “Narrate or Describe?” Phillips explores McCarthy’s calm treatment of violence and death, which McCarthy believes are the ultimate truths of human experience.

Sepich, John Emil. Notes on “Blood Meridian.” Louisville, Ky.: Bellarmine College Press, 1993. An expanded and revised version of Sepich’s master’s thesis. An exhaustive study of possible historical and literary sources for Blood Meridian.

Shaviro, Steven. “ The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian.” The Southern Quarterly 30 (Summer, 1992): 119-129. Shaviro maintains that although Blood Meridian is primarily about death, dying, and destruction, there is nevertheless a vitality and even a joy and comedy in the presentation. He considers McCarthy “our greatest living author.”

Shaw, Patrick W. “The Kid’s Fate, the Judge’s Guilt: Ramifications of Closure in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” The Southern Literary Journal 30 (Fall, 1997): 102-119. Shaw believes that most critics misinterpret the Griffin Jakes scene that appears at the end of Blood Meridian. The prevailing opinion is that Judge Holden murders the boy. Shaw argues that simple murder did not satisfy the Judge. Instead, he claims, the ultimate encounter with Jakes is sexual.

Cormac McCarthy has insisted in each of his works on the preeminent existence of evil in the world, but never before has he presented his readers with such a complex, demanding, and unrelieved exposition of it as in his fifth novel, Blood Meridian: Or, The Evening Redness in the West. Set in the American Southwest at the midpoint of the nineteenth century, it is, on the surface, a tale of the settling of the frontier, although the story is stripped of any noble pretense on the part of the settlers. Instead, the region is portrayed as a wilderness into which come the outcasts, the bandits and murderers and misfits of established society.

McCarthy’s protagonist is the kid. Born in 1833 (the year the stars fell, as William Faulkner reminds the reader in Go Down, Moses), the kid runs away from his broken Tennessee home when he is fourteen. By the time he reaches Texas in 1849, he has already abandoned the last vestiges of his childhood and has entered a world of incredible violence and depravity. Shortly after his arrival, he gets in a fight with a Mexican barman and gouges out the man’s eye with a broken whiskey bottle. Having thus proved his courage and willingness to fight, the kid is recruited by a Captain White, a former officer in the war with Mexico. White, who is insane, intends to lead a band of mercenaries back into Mexico, there to impose his rule and enslave the people. It is a godless land anyway, White argues, and the people are less than human. The kid, with nothing better to do, goes along, but after days of horrible suffering in the desert, the motley army is attacked and butchered by a band of Apache Indians. Only the kid and a few others miraculously manage to escape.

Making his way to a Mexican village (where he sees White’s head preserved in a jar of mescal), the kid is arrested and sent to Chihuahua City, where he is made to crawl on his hands and knees cleaning the gutters of the town. He is taken from jail by Captain John Joel Glanton, who has been contracted by Governor Trias of Chihuahua to kill the Apache. The Governor offers a bounty of one hundred dollars for each scalp—man, woman, child—they bring in. The group sets out and proceeds to match the Apache, atrocity for atrocity. There is no difference between the savagery practiced by the Indians and that shown by the white scalpers. No human life is respected in this terra damnata, this land of heat and dust and blood. Glanton and his men kill and scalp without remorse. When they return with their gory possessions and are paid, they turn on the inhabitants of Chihuahua and terrorize them during days of mad drinking and brutal revelry.

Finally, the scalpers themselves become the pursued, chased by the Mexican army, and they move on toward the West. After numerous episodes of carnage and unspeakable cruelty, they arrive at Yuma Crossing, in 1850. They take over the settlement there and shortly thereafter are massacred by a band of Indians they have attempted to betray. Once again, only the kid and a few others escape the slaughter.

Although the basic story and some of the main characters in Blood Meridian come from recorded fact, McCarthy has employed them for his own purposes, and his book is less a historical account of a particularly violent aspect of the settling of the West than it is a philosophical and even metaphysical examination of the motives behind the settling. The land itself is described as abandoned by God. Churches lie in ruins; figures of the Christ or of saints and martyrs are toppled and mutilated in the dirt. More than one church serves as a site for carnage rather than sanctuary. McCarthy holds no brief for Manifest Destiny. He presents no appointed agents of God bringing order and civilization into a heathen world. He sees man as naturally given to violence, whether he be Christian or pagan. McCarthy illustrates this view of man throughout the novel in the many acts of atrocity committed. “It’s a mystery,” an old hermit, a former slave trader, tells the kid near the beginning of the book:A man’s at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

This view of man is repeated by other voices and proved by other deeds in the story, but the figure that most clearly, and complexly, embodies the nature of evil is Judge Holden. The judge is a figure larger than life. On the one hand, he is a monstrous, disgusting freak—giant, hairless, brutal beyond telling. Yet he is also a philosophical, magical being, perhaps a god, more likely a devil. When the kid first sees him, the judge is disrupting a tent-revival service by falsely accusing the preacher of being a charlatan. Children mysteriously disappear when the judge is around; their innocence seems something to be destroyed, and there are suggestions that the judge abuses them sexually before killing them. He carries a book in which he records all the artifacts he finds of older civilizations and races; then he obliterates the artifact so that no other man can ever see it. “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent,” he says:The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

The man who comments most often on the judge is Tobin, the former priest, who warns the kid to beware the judge’s wiles. He refers to the judge as a “sootysouled rascal” and recalls for the kid how the judge once made gunpowder through what was almost a kind of satanic alchemy. The judge is often described as an idol, “some great pale deity,” who sits naked in the desert or before the fire, a thing of the flames themselves. When the kid asks, “What’s he a judge of?” Tobin refuses to answer. “Ah, lad.Hush now. The man will hear ye. He’s ears like a fox,” Tobin admonishes.

McCarthy seems to suggest that the pageant of blood played out in the novel should be seen as a paradigm for man’s eternal struggle in the world. McCarthy begins his book with quotations from Paul Valéry and Jakob Böhme that underscore the darkness in the heart of man. McCarthy also points out that scalping as an element of warfare, a symbol of victory, can be traced back into man’s collective, forgotten past. In one sense, then, McCarthy would argue that the struggle portrayed in the book, man’s attraction to “meanness,” will be repeated as long as man exists. It is inherent in his nature; his actions are preordained.

Indeed, Judge Holden argues for the rationality and even rightness of violence. “If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?” he asks:And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

The judge believes that war, the ritual and ceremony of blood, is the essential element in the dance of life, and that the warrior is the only true dancer. If one finds meaning, order in the world, one finds it only in its most elemental conflict, that between the slayer and the slain. War is the most noble act, according to the judge, because it most clearly defines the reality of life. It is the ritual that gives structure to chaos. As the judge says, “Only that man who has offered himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.”

The kid, however, holds back from the judge. Although he participates in all of the horrors, marks himself with blood with the same wildness as do the others, he still retains “some corner of clemency,” a kind of individual reserve or self-judgment, which keeps him from total depravity. He alone refuses to abandon himself completely to the violence, and thus he stands throughout as the judge’s adversary. “I recognized you when I first saw you and yet you were a disappointment to me. Then and now,” Holden finally tells the kid.

The ending of the book is ambiguous. After the massacre at Yuma Crossing, the kid spends another twenty-eight years wandering through the West before he once again encounters the judge, in a whorehouse in Fort Griffin, Texas. Once more, the judge appears unchanged, ubiquitous. He spies the kid and approaches: The meeting seems appointed. Later that night, the kid enters the jakes behind the saloon and finds there the judge, naked, smiling, waiting to embrace him in his monstrous hold. Apparently the kid is killed by the judge, although McCarthy refuses to state clearly the result of that meeting. The book then ends with an epilogue, a short parable on the question of causality. The parable forms an open-ended conclusion to the story. It suggests that order will follow, that the land will be settled, fenced, structured, that others will bring with them law, religion, civilization. Still, the pessimism of the tale remains. Our forefathers have been shown to us as little removed from the savage. What, the book asks, are we? Does the judge still live among us today? The answer seems to be yes.

Blood Meridian is not an enjoyable book to read, patterned as it is on successive acts of horror. Each chapter is prefaced by a list of the main events to be recounted in that section, a dry recitation of slaughter and sin. McCarthy presents the worst outrages without obvious moral condemnation. The vocabulary is often arcane and difficult, and the characters do not engage the reader’s sympathies. Indeed, there is little character development as such; the figures work as types rather than individuals. One is rarely shown their motives, beliefs, or hopes.

There is, however, an intense moral concern in this, as in all of McCarthy’s works. It is not nihilistic. It insists that we face the worst within us, not to embrace it, as the judge encourages, but to confront and challenge—at whatever price.