SOURCE: Twomey, Jay. “Tempting the Child: The Lyrical Madness of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Southern Quarterly 37, nos. 3-4 (spring-summer 1999): 255-65.

[In the following essay, Twomey characterizes Blood Meridian as a battle between the madness of Judge Holden, who converts the Glanton Gang to his irrational mindset, and the resistant kid—a battle in which the judge finally triumphs.]

I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
“Ah, God, take me from this place!”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”
I cried, “Well, but—
The sand, the heart, the vacant horizon.”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”

—Stephen Crane

Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian is an epic of violence stark and calamitous, set in the liminal desert. But its depiction of bloodshed is not, as some would have it, a commemoration of “slaughter in all its sumptuousness and splendor” (Shaviro 144) despite McCarthy's testamental lyricism. Violence here is rather symptomatic of the novel's more central obsession: madness. But this oversimplifies. Madness in Blood Meridian is a complex demon, multi-vocal and ultimately transcending designation as psychosis—though psychotics abound in this book. Or rather psychosis becomes an ambulant signifier in the novel defining an act, an individual, a group in turn—and perhaps coming to rest at last as plot and language, the novel itself. That Judge Holden is mad seems evident enough; but this is not his story. He, or his rendering of the world, “that hallucinatory void” (McCarthy 113), conjure meaning only from without his “unbroken sphere” (Foucault 22), and only for the one in a world of others—the kid. It is true that Glanton and his gang of marauders, as they hunt Apache and Comanche scalps (which fetched their historical counterparts two hundred dollars apiece in mid nineteenth-century Sonora and Chihuahua [Sepich 124]), participate fully in the judge's world. Yet since their participation is immediate, they cease as free agents. “Half crazed with the enormity of their own presence in that immense waste” (McCarthy 117), they fail to see themselves for what they are—mindless animators of an inhuman system. Inhuman, though, not in the sense evoked by the poetry of Robinson Jeffers, for instance, which would suggest a detached, nature-based worldview alien to Blood Meridian (Oelschlaeger 246-47). And systematic not in the way of Hegel or Descartes, though the judge is a mad hyperbole of each. But the kid, who rides among these men and participates in their crimes, represents something different and is not devoured (at least not with them) by the world which they perform. Blood Meridian is his story, then. Throughout the novel he stands just beyond the judge's sphere of influence, tenuously balancing between a nihilistic solipsism and an acceptance of the Other as other, postponing commitment in silence, awaiting a sign.

This critical assessment of the kid's relative worth vis-a-vis the judge suggests an ethical perspective: if Blood Meridian is ultimately dark and pessimistic, it is not because the judge finally wins, but because the kid does not. A nuance which consolidates the darkness but preserves, and projects beyond the novel, at least a trace of hope. Yet the alternative is equally plausible since the judge kills the kid two pages before the novel's end and thus becomes the voice of its conclusion. The judge's voice, in fact, dominates throughout. His temperament and vision resonate in McCarthy's beautifully crafted, mythic prose with “the awful darkness inside the world” (McCarthy 111)—the whole feel of the novel is him. If Blood Meridian were, however, no more than this metaphysics of violence,¹ this enigma of poetic narrative, it might stand on artistic merit but all value else would be questionable. The kid, though, arrives in the narrative and linguistic structure as a witness from without; and if he is a stark figure against that lavish canvas, still he is foregrounded and cast in relief.

In fact, McCarthy may have no choice but to risk such an imbalance if he is to adequately depict the madness behind the violence which the kid finally confronts at the novel's end. For though the term “gothic” appears frequently in studies of McCarthy's work, his is no merely gothic pessimism. His attitude seems rather like that of Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents—it is as if he has some foreboding of a real malevolence which, whether it manifests itself in American imperialism or war more generally, has its roots in our very nature. He very consciously employs the tropes of madness to manipulate our understanding of this peculiar evil. Specifically he portrays a medieval, apocalyptic insanity, or at least an idea of madness culled from interpretations of the images in Bosch, for example, or the characters of various mystery plays and danses macabres. At one point in the novel, the parallel is made emphatic. The “pilgrims,” as they are so often called, wander into the town of Jesús María and celebrate themselves. The judge, despite his enormity, dances blithely to the music of a fiddler, and we are told that they “seemed alien minstrels met by chance in this medieval town” (190). The men, “bedlamites,” lurch in grotesque carnival, looking “like fairybook beasts” as the night progresses (190). Such imagery is common in the novel. And they encounter others who also tap into this same iconography. The “itinerant magicians” who ask Glanton for safe conduit are “dressed in fools costumes with stars and halfmoons embroidered on … and they looked a set of right wanderfolk cast on this evil terrain” (89). A more ominous version of this magician family rides down upon yet another group of marauders “like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious” (53). Yet this description of the Comanches who attack the filibusters under Captain White could apply equally well to Glanton and his men at various points in the story.

Michel Foucault, in Madness and Civilization, tries to define more precisely what such imagery suggests. The madman in the Middle Ages, he says, “represents a sort of great unreason for which nothing, in fact, is exactly responsible, but which involves everyone in a kind of secret complicity” (13). This “great unreason,” though, at least before the Renaissance, paradoxically suggests a sort of knowledge. The madman, the Fool, brings consciousness to nonhuman, existential phenomena. Death, animality, brute force become vocal, surge up into what had been rational human experience and disrupt the order of things:

what is born from the strangest delirium was already hidden, like a secret, like an inaccessible truth, in the bowels of the earth. When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth; the vain images of blind idiocy—such are the world's Magna Scientia; and already, in this disorder, in this mad universe, is prefigured what will be the cruelty of the finale.

(Foucault 23)

It is as if in such representations of madness as Foucault studies, humanity experiences the world-in-itself; but unlike Faust before the Erdgeist we find we are unable to withdraw. The madman, or better yet, the Fool, bears this reality to us, “intact as an unbroken sphere” (22). Whether or not such lyrical scholarship accurately reveals madness as the Middle Ages understood it remains, of course, an open question. Roy Boyne, in Foucault and Derrida: The Other Side of Reason, is critical of Foucault's analyses. Boyne asserts that madness in Bosch and Brueghel, for instance, is not dark revelation but “a form and threat within this world” (16)—unknowable perhaps, but something to be countered with faith. What Boyne ultimately seems to reject is not Foucault's understanding,² but his presentation of madness. Certainly, early in Madness and Civilization, descriptions of the Fool are creative, even romantic. But perhaps it is this very creativity after all that “effects a secret liberation” (Kayser 188) of such enigmas of madness as medieval painting and literature present.

In any case, the extent to which Blood Meridian shares Foucault's perspective is remarkable. The Fool's madness is also a frightening wisdom. While the scalp-hunters await an Apache attack—which recalls the earlier Comanche episode—they hear “high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below” (109). These are like the apocalyptic horsemen Foucault describes as “disheveled warriors of a mad vengeance”; with their arrival, “the world sinks into universal Fury” (23). Their arrival heralds forth an order not our own. Yet neither are they wholly other. While it may seem an “unliberal irony of McCarthy's story that the Indians in it are if anything more deranged and barbarous” than Glanton and his gang (Bell 123), in actuality the former merely reify the latter. Each mirrors each, and McCarthy offers the reification to show the Americans as they appear to the Other, to the “peaceful Tiguas” (McCarthy 173) who watch in dumbstruck amazement as these murderers bear down on them

like beings provoked out of the absolute rock and set nameless and at no remove from their own loomings to wander ravenous and doomed and mute as gorgons shambling the brutal wastes … in a time before nomenclature was and each was all.

(172)

Seen from within, this mythic presence fragments into specific men: Brown, who wears the scapular of dried human ears; Toadvine, who bears the scars of brutal prison time done; Webster, the Tennessean who does not want his portrait drawn; Tobin, the ex-priest who befriends the kid and maintains incongruous to his present crimes a reverent faith in God; Glanton, who left a wife and children behind in Texas; and, of course, the Judge. True, McCarthy leaves much about these men mysterious; they tend to remain one body, flaring into individual distinction momentarily, here and there, then merging into the group again. But this only renders the reified image all the more unstable—so that the Other who commands knowledge of the world's dark truths is perhaps no Other at all.

Of all the characters in Blood Meridian, it is the judge who most closely resembles the apocalyptic madman as Foucault describes him, who most fully possesses the knowledge of which the magicians and Apaches and Comanches are only representations. In a sense, he literally knows the earth. Darwin and the geologist Charles Lyell, among others, were active in expounding vast new theories of human and global history at the time the novel takes place. It is not unlikely, therefore, that so learned a man as the judge could extemporize on matters scientific. That “he purport[s] to read news of the earth's origins” in ore samples he finds might be disturbing to the company's men, but it is not so far beyond the possible as to suggest madness. Yet somehow it is. For the source of the judge's knowledge remains a mystery in this passage. When some of the men question his irreligious reckonings and quote from the Bible to prove him wrong he smiles and tells them “books lie.” Then when they are finally convinced by the evidence, and become “right proselytes of the new order,” the judge “laugh[s] at them for fools.” But where could he have learned the new geology if not from books? He suggests, in fact, that what he knows comes from the very mouth of God; and that while the Bible lies, God still “speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things” (116). All of which he might reasonably assert in an effort to convert them. Why then would he scorn the apostles of his new faith unless his knowledge was not what they took it for? When later someone sees him “naked atop the walls, immense and pale in the revelations of lightning … and declaiming in the old epic mode” (118), any understanding of how the judge knows what he knows becomes problematic.

The judge communes, as it were, with nature. He walks through “fire and the flames deliver … him up as if he were in some way native to their element” (96). He conducts the scattered confusion of bats (148). He knows the earth. And his rendering of the natural order informs the narrative itself. McCarthy's vivid and powerful descriptions of the desert, the mountains, the sea—during that portion of the novel in which the judge's presence dominates—suggest some sinister complicity between nature and this man; or at the very least they confirm that a knowledge once hidden “in the bowels of the earth” (Foucault 22) is resurrected with the coming of madness. Things in the world become dual, utterly devoid of intelligence on the one hand and yet intentional if not conscious on the other. When the pilgrims see dust spouts in the distance, for example, the phenomenon is described in terms of both “mindless coils” and the lurchings of “some drunken djinn” (111). Later the heat rising from the desert plain makes its surface a “hallucinatory void” (113), as if sheer emptiness could harbor anything and yet remain so, as if nothingness itself were a prey to visions. The flames from the lone burning tree the kid discovers “shed scattered sparks down the storm like hot scurf blown from some unreckonable forge howling in the waste” (214). Presence and absence. Being and nothing. Signs abound but a perilous silence keeps them from speaking. McCarthy's imagery, even at its most fantastic, retains this ambiguity.

The images themselves call for a metaphysical interpretation. But it is poetry and not philosophy which is most revealing here. Blood Meridian is a novel cluttered with simile and metaphor. Encounters with actuality, or with the unconcealed world the judge knows, inactuate counter realities. Things are experienced in terms other than their own, if terms they have at all. Thus, the question of what must again be secondary to how the judge knows, and he knows poetically, artistically. The narrative, which is so infused with the judge, conjures a world upon the mere presence of things. Figurative language speculates an alternative nature which the characters, “proselytes of the new order” (116), inhabit and in which the judge, the leader of “some dim sect” (187), guides and instructs them. It constructs a mythic space that deceives as it attracts, and it allows for a play of ambiguities appropriate to the kinds of madness McCarthy is interested in. As if to enhance the effectiveness of these illusions, McCarthy sets his novel in the desert—the ultimate liminal arena. According to Victor Turner, the liminal space is actually the psychological moment of least resistance. The social structures normally at play in governing life are held in temporary abeyance while individuals or cultures experience the rites of passage. For Turner the liminal moment is a highly creative one, and thus the liminal passenger is a kind of artist, since from within liminality one can freely and totally restructure values and norms (Turner 255-57). If the desert is the judge's primary sphere of action in the novel, and if the story's feel is most suggestive of the judge's perspectives, then we are not just reading fiction but a fictional fictionalization of the world. The judge as liminal passenger is an artist of phenomena and experience who reconstructs the world in its absence according to his own desires.

This continuous deconstruction of norms, of conceptual structures, is what constitutes for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their book A Thousand Plateaus, the essence of “nomad thought.” Within the “smooth space” of liminality, they argue, “every possibility of subordinating thought to a model of the True, the Just, the Right” is destroyed (377). Here one encounters a more authentic—i.e., unstable and atheistic—absolute (383). It is the world of the Bakhtinian carnival which declares war on stale and alienating stratifications of value. And war is, in fact, the nomad's mode of existence. To paraphrase the judge, “war is [the nomad's] God” (McCarthy 249). The most important aspect of the liminal for Deleuze and Guattari, however, is that it never ends in reagregation, but is rather “a way of making violence durable, even unlimited” (396). Though the judge does reconstruct a new order, he apparently finds smooth space too tempting to leave, the idea of having to accommodate himself to another's law being unacceptable. Though these connections are illuminating, the idea of smooth space developed in A Thousand Plateaus bathes Judge Holden in much too glorious a light and can lead to readings which actually grant a “vitality” to so much “violence and blood, dying and destruction” (Shaviro 155) which see in the menacing exile of Glanton and his men “our [own] primordial and positive condition” (145). Such vitality seems fairly pathological. It may be that the madness in Blood Meridian is a direct result of this suspension in liminality, this refusal of the return. For life outside of social stratification and sign systems would be the equivalent of insanity, “a mere chaos of pointless acts and exploding emotions … [which would render] experience virtually shapeless” (Geertz 46). Such is life within the “war machine.” This is, of course, an oversimplification. Any cohesive social group, even that of these theoretical nomads, inheres within a symbolic system. It is true, though, that the judge like the nomad has “no history … only … a geography” (Deleuze and Guattari 393). Perhaps this anti-ontology is precisely what makes liminality so attractive to the characters of McCarthy's novel. For history's absence creates a void that only freedom can fill.

Out of that void and that freedom comes the judge. Tobin the ex-priest recalls that when the company first encountered the judge, he was “in the middle of the greatest desert you'd ever want to see. …

we come upon the judge on his rock there in that wilderness by his single self. Aye, and there was no rock, just the one. Irving said he'd brung it with him. I said that it was a merestone for to mark him out of nothing at all. … He appeared a lunatic and then not.

(124-25, 127)

What is most peculiar about the judge upon this first encounter is his lack of apparent surprise. Not in the least inconvenienced by the heat or isolation, he just sat there “like he'd been expecting [them]. … He didn't even have a canteen” (125). When Glanton offered to take him along “he looked about him with the greatest satisfaction in the world, as if everything had turned out just as he had planned and the day could not have been finer” (126). This attitude, it turns out, is most characteristic of him. He then leads them deep into the malpais and, on the slope of a volcanic cone, works a miracle in charcoal, sulfur, nitre, and urine to save them all from annihilation. While the world he knows is like that of the apocalyptic medieval madman—chaos made conscious and manifest—it is primarily a world of his making. And into his creation he has not failed to inscribe a certain order. Thus he knows, for instance, how to make gunpowder from the various elements at hand. It is not surprising, then, to find him beyond all reason and in the middle of a desert anticipating the company's arrival.

Much of the judge's later discourse, in fact, is an elucidation of the world's order as he finds it. To the men, he has an air of satisfaction, “as if [he thought] his counsel had been sought at [the earth's] creation” (140). He speaks often of history and the destinies of men in terms of what Deleuze and Guattari call the rhizome, a great interconnecting web of relations. But with a twist. The rhizome suggests freedom and lack of striation, but the judge's order is a form of entrapment. “Every man is tabernacled in every other,” he says, “and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world” (141). The pattern of our doings is fraught with no mystery, tabernacled as we are in the book of existence. We may choose to ignore this, the judge says, and ground ourselves in some lesser order, the social unit perhaps. Such an order, however, is not the world's in truth, but “a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent” (245). The real beneath this teeming unreality is better conceived of in terms of a game or, rather, a dance. A dance is fluid structure, a freedom of motion which yet limits and defines our freedom. Finally, it is something to which we dancers are transitory and ephemeral though dancing be our life.

As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. … But order is not set aside because of their indifference.

(329, 328)

Here the knowledge which the Fool possesses in an unbroken sphere becomes the Magna Scientia indeed. Once again it is not what the judge knows but how he knows it that is suggestive for interpretation. If existence is this dance, and if, as he says, “no man's mind can compass [it], that mind itself being but a fact among others” (245), then the judge, since he obviously comprehends the whole, must be more than a fact among others. He must be, in fact, the dance itself. Blood Meridian's eerie final chapter seems to bear this out in imagery at least with the judge dancing “in light and in shadow,” proclaiming that he never sleeps and that he'll never die (335). He is the dance comprehending itself. The novel offers further clues as well, especially when it depicts the judge's relationship to things external to himself. It is here, in these episodes, that McCarthy's highly stylized and intentional mystification of the judge as medieval Fool dissolves and resolves itself into a more human madness.

Throughout the book the judge as geologist has seemed more a divinely ordained priest of the actual than a learned practitioner of the scientific method. He takes notes, collects natural specimens, and human artifacts and sets himself to studying whenever he can. His science, however, is rather a perversion of subjective idealism and recalls Johann Fichte, for instance, in its destruction of the Kantian thing-in-itself. For Fichte the world is a product of subjective activity such that “there is … absolutely no such thing as an existence which has no relation to” ourselves (96). The judge would concur, but would consider his subjective construction of the world not in terms of consciousness but of the will. Unlike Fichte, who spoke of the thing-in-itself as a concept to be destroyed, the judge is bent on destroying the thing in its actuality. Thus he says, in a sentence that seems to paraphrase Fichte's, “whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” (McCarthy 198). He palms the earth and tells Toadvine that “this is my claim … and yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation” (199). He wants, he says, to be “suzerain of the earth” (198), to comprehend reality as only the dance itself can. He records in his notebook, or keeps a memento of the things he perceives, and then destroys the original so that the only remaining thing is his creation, his possession. People no different from things. In a sense he is like the paranoiac Freud describes who recreates the world to better suit his wishes. “Reality is too strong for him,” Freud argues. “He becomes a madman who for the most part [should find] no one to help him in carrying through his delusion” (Freud 28). Even though the thing-in-itself and the Other are stubborn in their autonomy, in this case there is no shortage of willing accomplices to help the judge become the inhuman system he has envisioned and which for him is the world.

The judge is not so much a madman as he is madness itself—at least the peculiar form of madness at the center of Blood Meridian. Freud claimed that his description of the paranoiac was just an intensified version of everyone, since each of us “corrects some aspect of the world … by the construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality” (28). These men who become scalp-hunters belong nowhere. Toadvine, Bathcat, and the kid, in fact, are prisoners working in a penal chain-gang when the judge and Glanton recruit them and secure their release. They are already marginal, liminal—but this only means they are perhaps better positioned than the rest of us to delve in fantasy constructs. The judge offers them a very tempting model. To be the center of things! To know the world in terms of your own presence only! To be “so profoundly terrible as to register even to the uttermost granulation of reality” (McCarthy 247)! Glanton has already succumbed. He and the judge confer frequently in the novel, alone and beyond even the narrative ear. It is clear that the judge has influenced him. McCarthy very rarely reveals his character's inner selves, but he does so when Glanton, sitting before the fire, staring into its glow, waxes contemplative:

he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkment as if he'd ordered it all ages since …

(243)

The language hints not only that the judge has influenced Glanton, but that he has actually entered his psyche and in a sense speaks through him now. Glanton's insistence on agency is no ordinary claim of freedom, for he deigns to become his own omniscient deity, creature, and creator in one. If life, as the judge suggests, is a web of intersecting destinies, then Glanton here usurps not only his own fate, but every life within its ken as well. The judge as paradigm offers one so much.

Wish-fulfilling delusions of grandeur, nevertheless, are not exactly what the judge represents. As madness, he is protean, suggesting the Erdgeist, liminality, paranoia, and perhaps still another category: temptation. As Foucault indicates in the context of fifteenth-century renderings of Temptations, “the freedom, however frightening, of his dreams, the hallucinations of his madness, have more power of attraction … than the desirable reality of the flesh” (20-21). Like the Cheshire Cat, he is an irresistible smile glowing in the face of absence.³ While the judge as madness may indefinitely postpone strict definition, the judge as a physical presence in Blood Meridian is remarkably unchanging. He is described from the beginning to the end as “an enormous infant” (McCarthy 335). He is huge and hairless and likes to spend much of his leisure time either stark naked or in his breeches alone. Innocent, of course, he is not. But neither in a sense is he mature. Much of what has been said about him—his freedom from structure in liminality, his wish-fulfilling reconstructions of the world, his desire to unite subject and object—seem highly characteristic of the infantile moment, life in the pleasure principle. Indeed, liminality in this case allows for an indefinite postponement of one's entry into reality. Or, put another way, the judge is the Lacanian mirror stage gone wrong. Rather than recognizing in the existence of others an essential gap between himself and the world, the judge-child in an absolute narcissism sees reflected in all others the unity of his own self.⁴ His desired identity as the dance already suggests this. His childishness takes a more traditional form as well in his understanding of what constitutes the unhappiness of people generally. Pointing out a man muttering to himself in a bar, the judge indicates “the actual case with him. … [w]hich is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do” (330). There is a desire here to return to the pre-mirror stage, in fact, to the infantile ego-world which satisfies all wants and has as yet not posed the problem of the Other. This, in part at least, is one reason for the violence in Blood Meridian. The ego, before the Law has established its garrison within,⁵ is an innately aggressive entity. Its “blindest fury of destructiveness” (Freud 68), though, is not simply a function of appetites. The instinct for aggression also results from the ego's “wishes for omnipotence,” the establishment of which “is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment” (68). Violence is necessary since the Other, the not-me, is an affront to the self's unity; in destroying it we are necessarily enacting self love. With the judge this aggression extends to the nonhuman Other, thing-in-itself, as well. Even a bird's freedom is an insult to him (McCarthy 199).

What he represents for these men, who are coarse and violent towards everyone else and even amongst themselves yet utterly enthralled by him, is the return to a state which promises satisfaction in every way. Thus it is ironic that the only character really capable of resisting the judge's allure is named “the kid.” (McCarthy obviously has some fun in this novel, playing as he does with the conventions of names, for example, in westerns.) Not that the kid is any less culpable than his fellow scalp-hunters, for he certainly participates in their crimes, and he commits a few of his own as well. Yet he is the only one in the novel ever described as innocent (4) despite the experience of violence. Unlike Glanton and his men, the kid does not immediately participate in the killings. He rarely speaks in those portions of the novel in which the judge dominates; he remains aloof while his companions often reaffirm verbally their faith in the judge's order. Even more importantly, however, he remains self-conscious and aware of the criminality of his actions. This is precisely what the judge finds most reprehensible in him. Not only is the kid other to him as people, rocks, and trees are—threatening simply because he is outside—he is critically other as well. Some part of him “judges” himself and his companions and acknowledges guilt. The kid recognizes the gap between self and world and does not try to destroy it. “There's a flawed place in the fabric of your heart,” the judge says. “You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen” (299). Whether the kid acknowledges, as Levinas says we must, that the Other is an infinity beyond ourselves,⁶ he certainly is the only one in the book who ever shows real concern for selves outside of his own.

That the kid remains outside and is not drawn into the judge's nihilistic solipsism is made clear from the narrative style itself. The chapters of Blood Meridian which deal with him exclusively after he escapes from the judge are different from the rest of the novel in their relative lack of simile and mythic imagery. The diction retains an occasional archaic touch, but the narrative is subdued and more direct, that is, until the judge returns. At that moment, when the kid turns and sees him across a crowded barroom in the last chapter, the grand style recurs. It is language visitant on one grown absent of words. Not that the kid has remained in silence during the decade of his wandering. In fact it is during these years that he makes his first attempts at communication. Or rather, personal communication. After the Yuma massacre and his pursuit through the desert, the kid arrives in San Diego and awaits his arrest, seemingly wills it. McCarthy gives little indication as to why the kid should be put in jail, but the kid has obviously made an ethical choice to accept, even cling to, the structures which liminality tries to destroy. Whether his confession of his desert crimes manifests a desire for punishment or consolation remains unclear. He gets neither. In any event, there is no attempt at a dialogue—the kid speaks only to speak. On the other hand, with Tobin, the ex-priest, the kid had established a meaningful if brief relationship, for he carries a Bible with him ever after and people “[take] him for a sort of preacher” (312), though he does not preach. Later he encounters an old woman huddled in an alcove in the wilderness with whom he speaks. He confesses something of his life to her, as he does again after this to a group of kids. This time he speaks as an offering or a gesture of openness, however feeble the attempt.

But communication fails. The priest disappears and the Bible he cannot read, being illiterate. The old woman is merely the shell of one long dead. One of the boys, raised in violence and trying to be a man, comes after him at night with a shotgun, and the kid kills him. In the end, as in the beginning: silence. Initially silence was his protection. He literally does not speak much at all in the novel. In this way, by refusing to enter into language, he shows an unwillingness to enter the law. And the judge confronts him about it, asking, “Was it always your idea … that if you did not speak you would not be recognized” (328)? It is as if the kid wants a freedom that in reality is not available to him or us. It is as if he wants to be exempt. But it is also as if the kid were a free agent looking for the law that suits him. Somehow Tobin's faith appeals to him, and he tries to choose it. It does not speak to him, though, nor he to it. Then there is the judge who, though in one sense represents a return to infantile fantasies, is nevertheless law too. After all, he is a judge. In a dream the kid sees him directing the production of counterfeit coins, the creation “in the crucible [of] a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge …” (310). The judge seems to define the nature and value of relations between individuals, and he does so in images of his own choosing. Again, he is the dance, or, in this case, commerce. He is an order rendered in terms of its own symbology. All the kid needs is to let the judge speak through him, let the law recognize him as Glanton does, and thereby validate his inmost desires towards aggression and dominance.

Finally, it is as if the kid were trying to keep from admitting that the judge's order is really the true order of the world—all others being constructions upon or responses to this first law. The judge, though, is nothingness made manifest, and admitting his order is an acceptance of death. As liminality, as the Fool's apocalyptic knowledge, as regression to infantile fantasy, the judge becomes death of one kind or another. At the end he admits of this assertion's general veracity when the kid calls him “nothing” and he responds: “You speak truer than you know” (331). When he makes his way to the bar in which he meets the judge again, the kid seems to clutch at almost anything that might forestall this conclusion. Standing by the door, “he looked back a last time at the street and at the random windowlights let into the darkness and at the last pale light in the west and the low dark hills around” (324). It is a benign scene, one which might offer solace in its elemental contentment. But it does not speak. Tired of delaying the inevitable, he enters the bar for a final encounter with the Father who will love him like a son (306). His death soon follows. Walking out to the jakes, he again pauses on the threshold, on the outer edge of striation. Behind him are voices, light, the commotion of the bar and dance hall. Before him the darkness within made explicit in bodily terms—the latrine, the judge seated there naked. Looking up, the kid sees “the silent tracks of the stars where they died over the darkened hills” (333). Night has obscured the earlier, more hopeful scene, and the unalterable destinies gliding above perhaps finally confirm what he has long tried to deny: that the world he traversed in that liminal desert is the only world there is. That he should find or be found by the judge again at the end of his wandering should come as no surprise. Besides, he has been hearing sporadic reports of the judge's whereabouts for years before this inevitable encounter. It was, unfortunately, only a matter of time. When he opens the door to the outhouse, the judge rises up “smiling and gather[s] him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh …” (333). Though McCarthy refrains from depicting the last violent act, he suggests a gruesome violation and murder. The judge, since he cannot convert the kid as he did Glanton, must literally posses him, incorporate him into the madness of his world's true order. The judge returns to the bar, there to dance his dance with a macabre and joyous exuberance. He dances the Other's death in his own eternal dance of life.

The narrative concludes at this point, but McCarthy ends the novel with a bewildering epilogue in which a “a man progress[es] over the plain by means of the holes which he is making in the ground” (337). Perhaps this man is a raiser of fences. Perhaps he is forging the telegraph road. Either way, his progress structures the liminal space and maps it with a sequence of holes. Despite the seeming management of such nomadic terrain as the judge has inhabited throughout, McCarthy still preserves even here the sense of the dance. There are others on the plain as well, “and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality …” (337). These are no individuals but the machinery of some vast clockwork. Even in the world of borders, communication, and commerce, the judge's reality prevails. It is here, perhaps, that McCarthy's pessimism reaches its climax since the only one able to know and yet combat this way of knowing the world is now gone. But the kid never assents, he just gives in—weary after a decade of futile attempts to find and affirm something better. While the figures on the plain may embroider its surface with the ordained patterns of their lives, they are not conscious that they do so. The kid's self-consciousness, on the other hand, rendered him autonomous. The judge knew this. Glanton's sense of agency was always but mere delusion. The kid, though, could really have been free to establish a more satisfactory world. This, however, would have required faith and a relinquishing of the critical distance which allowed the kid to escape in the first place. McCarthy's pessimism reflects his conception of some basic, aggressive solipsism in human nature, certainly. Ultimately, though, he seems uncertain of our capacity to construct meaning without slipping into some form of delusion. For the critical self-consciousness which constitutes our freedom also limits our capacity to participate fully in the world.

McCarthy's pessimism, however, is not absolute. When the kid confesses and contextualizes himself before the old woman, for instance, communion, renewal, and faith all seem possible. There is just no one in Blood Meridian to hear him. It is not until the kid reappears as John Grady Cole in McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses (1992), a fictional century later, that we have better reason to trust in the efficacy of hope.

Notes

1. “The Metaphysics of Violence” is the title of an essay on McCarthy by Vereen Bell.

2. Compare the following statement, for example, with the quote from Foucault's page 13: “For Bosch, madness is a part of all of us” (Boyne 20).

3. See Foucault's description of Saint Anthony's Temptation (20).

4. For a discussion of the mirror stage and narcissism, see Lacan (93).

5. See Freud (71) for whom the super-ego is established internally “like a garrison in a conquered city.”

6. Emmanuel Levinas, French phenomenologist. See his Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969).

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McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. New York: Vintage, 1985.

Oelschlaeger, Max. The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology. New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Sepich, John Emil. “‘What kind of Indians was them?’ Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Edwin Arnold and Dianne Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 121-41.

Shaviro, Steven. “‘The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Edwin Arnold and Dianne Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 143-56.

Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974.