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. Amidst the arbitrary violence and mindless wanderings of the Glanton Gang, we find only the judge's voice, for he provides the coherence, the order, the meaning that defines the scalp hunter's pilgrimage west. Certainly McCarthy's most articulate, cunning, and slippery character to date, the judge is a nightmarish embodiment of the myths of colonial expansion, myths that he extends, rewrites, and reconstructs to apocalyptic ends. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy reconsiders the myths (and mythmakers) informing the discursive and political practices that defined and created the Frontier. By examining the judge's impermeable, amoral logos, which demarcates the judge's westward expansion as a textual enterprise, I hope to bring those discursive practices to light.

I have broken down my analysis of the judge and his discourse of violence and disruption into three interrelated discussions. In the first, I explore 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. The second section of my study focuses on 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.² In the judge, we see the violence of authorship, for the act of inscription implies a simultaneous erasure of an existent text. In the final section, I examine 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.

I

The judge's entrance into the novel in Reverend Green's revival tent immediately establishes him as a trickster—as a figure who turns the world upsidedown, who spits at convention and embraces taboos, who essentially transgresses any and all boundaries that establish order. Warwick Waldington's study, The Confidence Game in American Literature (1975), elaborates the transgressive role of the trickster figure:

The Trickster tricks because everything—whether law, proposition, or role—is immaterial to him as an end and completely credible to him as a means, in light of his powerful instinctual life.

(159)

Like the archetypal trickster Waldington describes, the judge remains free from the telos endemic of a closed system; thus, any role, rule, or law can be invoked or revoked as the situation warrants, for the only “end” the judge recognizes is encapsulated within his own ego. The arbitrariness of the judge's transgressions, dictated by “means” rather than “ends,” undermines the notion of the heroic figure who transforms the self by extending and even disrupting social codes and conventions. As critic Steven Shaviro suggests, “What is most disturbing about the orgies of violence that punctuate Blood Meridian is that they fail to constitute a pattern, to unveil a mystery or to serve any comprehensible purpose” (114). The “pattern” I hope to identify lies in the very notion of transgression, for the judge is a figure who revels in the self-affirmation each act of transgression constitutes, but who creates new boundaries and new texts only to transgress them in a perpetuating cycle of return.

We see the effects of the judge's disruptions following his mendacious announcement of the Reverend Green's pedophilic tendencies (pedophilia, of course, is actually the judge's forte): “Already gunfire was general within the tent and a dozen exits had been hacked through the canvas walls and people were pouring out, women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot in the mud” (7). The collapsed walls and the outward spray of mob chaos that characterize that scene accompany the judge wherever he travels. In his article “The Dance of History in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian,” John Sepich examines the novel's arcane symbols, specifically the Tarot cards that emerge during the gypsy's fortune telling. He identifies the judge with the Fool, the character who animates the entire Tarot deck. According to Sepich, the Fool embodies superrational sanity, is a wanderer, omnipresent, and immortal (23), who upsets the static order with his mad dance. The Fool, like the trickster, can be understood as a marginal figure on the cultural periphery who upsets the balance; however, the trickster and the Fool also embody the ideals of the dominant culture and are socially sanctioned, even embraced, by its constituents. In the scene following the eruption in the tent, we see the judge re-incorporated into the communal fold in a saloon where everyone laughs together and “someone [buys] the judge a drink” (8). In his dual role as insider and outsider, the judge straddles oppositions, existing “betwixt and between” two cultural locations.³

As a trickster figure, the judge signifies chaos, lawlessness, and transgression; however, as an ethnographer, he is able to re-assert order, a textual order that empowers him as both interpreter and writer. As the trickster, he demythologizes and demystifies; as ethnographer, he concurrently creates his own myths and his own mysteries. As the ex-priest Tobin says to the kid, “As if he were no mystery himself, the bloody old hoodwinker” (252). Thus he moves between those two roles: at once transgressing boundaries and violating social codes and at the same time, creating new ones, positing man as essentially the machinery of war and violence. In his introduction to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986), James Clifford defines ethnography's liminal status:

Ethnography is actively situated between powerful systems of meaning. It poses its questions at the boundaries of civilizations, cultures, classes, races, and genders. Ethnography decodes and recodes, telling the grounds of collective order and diversity, inclusion and exclusion.

(2)

As the title of my essay suggests, the judge functions as a “witness to the uttermost edge of the world” (McCarthy 141), a witness similarly situated at the boundaries between civilizations, who continually “decodes and recodes” the governing myths. Interestingly, this role as “witness,” or ethnographer, is absent from the historical account Sepich provides in his second article on the novel, “‘What kind of Indians was them?’: Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Using Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession as his source, Sepich describes the actual historical figure known as Judge Holden:

Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos … he was acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy.

(97)

There is no mention of the historical Judge Holden as an ethnographer or anthropologist, as a surveyor, collector, and interpreter of cultures, but in McCarthy's reconstruction of the character, that role most clearly defines the source of his strength and the nature of his power.

In his essay “Hermes' Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description,” Vincent Crapanzano identifies the ethnographer as a trickster figure, but one who masks that facet of his role beneath the cunning rhetorical veneer of “science” and “objectivity.” Crapanzano compares the ethnographer to the hermeneut, Hermes, who “clarifies the opaque, renders the foreign familiar, and gives meaning to the meaningless. He decodes the message. He interprets” (51). That ability to interpret, to impose order, and to make meaning acts as the vehicle empowering ethnographic rhetoric. Crapanzano explains the violence of that discourse:

Hermes was a phallic god and a god of fertility. Interpretation has been understood as a phallic, a phallic-aggressive, a cruel and violent, a destructive act.

(52)

As the boundary dweller, as a character unfettered by social structures and cultural mores, the judge's power to interpret is absolute, for he allies himself with no outside authority save his own will and his own self-defined logos. He states, “In order for it [the world] to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation” (199). The “true” ethnographer must mask this will to power, for he claims to act in the name of “science,” according to Crapanzano. As a trickster figure unimpeded by a similar authority, the judge constructs a world view in which the world must ultimately answer to him. In his sublime egoism, we see the judge's refusal to exist as a symbol user; instead, he posits himself in the role of symbol maker, as the creator of textual order.

The immensity of the judge's hairless, scarless, tattooless body indicates the unidirectionality of his constructive and interpretive power; he remains an ahistorical figure seemingly untouched by events in the world. As a self-written figure, the judge elides history and its processes with a totalizing structure based on violence, war, and his own textual authority. According to Waldington, the trickster figure follows a similar pattern of self-written rebirth, for he is “the true arche-type, the creative and determining first moment from which all moments develop” (5). Of course, that depiction posits the trickster as a point of origin from which other moments evolve. McCarthy's trickster, however, constitutes a continual return to this origin and thus resists any form of teleological end. In that way, he is linked to the archetypal Adamic figure R. W. B. Lewis describes in The American Adam:

His moral position was prior to experience, and in his very newness he was fundamentally innocent. The world and history lay all before him. And he was the type of creator, the poet par excellence, creating language itself by naming the elements of the scene about him. All this and more were contained in the image of the American as Adam.

(5)

The judge is an extension of that figure; early in the novel his face is described as “serene and strangely childlike” (6). Like the Adamic figure, the judge is an innocent with the textual power of a creator, a role he continually fashions and refashions throughout his journeying. According to the tradition Lewis identifies, that power to control the text, to “name,” is a way to extend the boundaries of the self and is construed as a productive act. However, in Blood Meridian such textual power is the ultimate vehicle of war and death; thus, McCarthy suggests that violence itself is an inherent quality of Adamic innocence.

The judge remains outside of time as an Adamic trickster, but historical process inscribes itself on all other characters in the novel, a process made visible in their etched bodies.

They moved on to the public baths where they descended one by one into the waters, each more pale than the one before and all tattooed, branded, sutured, the great puckered scars inaugurated God knows where by what barbarous surgeons across chests and abdomens like the tracks of gigantic millipedes, some deformed, fingers missing, eyes, their foreheads and arms stamped with letters and numbers as if they were articles requiring inventory.

(167)

Each man has been catalogued, inventoried, and physically altered by his experiences in the world; each scar, tattoo, brand, and suture represents historicizing links back to those experiences. Significantly, the bathing scene denies a ritual purification and rebirth to the judge's followers. Just as their bodies remain branded, scarred, and tattooed, the men cannot be cleansed by this water, which soon becomes transformed “into a thin gruel of blood and filth” (167), an effluvium representative of their past and their existence within it. Only the judge remains curiously untouched by “the dance of history”; he is a tabula rasa resisting inscription.

Although critics often compare the judge to a more deranged version of Captain Ahab,⁴ none has picked up on his uncanny relationship to Melville's bald giant Queequeg. The judge can be read as a strange inversion of Queequeg's tattooed arabesque, for rather than bearing the mark of history's inscription, he is instead ever-reborn like a bizarre infant in swaddling clothes. When the judge, with the imbecile in tow, arrives at the Alamo Mucho well, he is described as “a pale pink beneath his talc of dust like something newly born” (282), a testament to his self-defined and self-perpetuating ego. Again, that depiction of the judge follows traditional fictional impulses, as Lewis suggests:

For what some novelists were to discover was that the story implicit in American experience had to do with an Adamic person, springing from nowhere, outside time, at home only in the presence of nature and God.

(89)

The judge, a similar ahistorical figure, fits that schema but also resists it, for his “home” is located not in “nature and God,” but in his self-created ego.

II

Whereas the Glanton Gang, each member etched with an individualized history, functions diachronically, the judge functions as a synchronizing structure, pure cause and pure effect without a “self” that is similarly effected. That unidirectional structure relies on the scalp hunter's complicity (and the complicity of all men), for they must never question their role as a cog in the judge's machine. The judge states:

It is not necessary … that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party.

(85)

And, of course, the judge is the “witness,” the “repository” who acts as an outside party both organizing and interpreting the data. The “principals” involved in this westward journey need not know or understand the “principles” governing their movements; they need only act. “History” does not require their understanding; moreover, their understanding would threaten the judge's textual power and interpretive control. The judge goes on to say, “Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning” (85). Again, the judge posits himself at the center of meaning, as the being who controls words, and thus the things those words possess. Lewis describes this relation between words and things as elemental to the Adamic figure: “This new Adam is both maker and namer … [t]he things that are named seem to spring into being at the sound of the word” (51). The judge's ability to transform chaos into order stems from his textualization of the universe. He alone controls historical intentionality; he alone controls the meaning behind words, and he alone controls their application.

The ultimate manifestation of the judge's textual enterprise is his book, for in it he transcribes, translates, and captures the cultures he encounters. Like the ethnographer, the judge “is always caught up in the invention, not the representation, of cultures” (Clifford 2). In fact, McCarthy relies on numerous anthropological tropes to define and shape the judge's textual assault on the landscape, tropes that postmodern ethnographers⁵ examine as discursive formations with significant political ramifications. Perhaps the dominant ethnographic trope in McCarthy's novel is that of the “disappearing culture,” which James Clifford examines in “On Ethnographic Allegory”:

The theme of the vanishing primitive, of the end of traditional society … is pervasive in ethnographic writing. … Undeniably, ways of life can, in a meaningful sense, “die”; populations are regularly violently disrupted, sometimes exterminated. Traditions are constantly being lost. But the persistent and repetitious “disappearance” of social forms at the moment of their ethnographic representation demands analysis as a narrative structure.

(112)

What this “narrative structure” posits is a powerful monoculture inflicting its will on subordinate cultures, erasing their “authentic” social structures and contaminating them with “civilization.”⁶ This sense of “global entropy” (113) that Clifford describes justifies ethnographic imperialism, for “we” must textualize “them” before competing powers erase “them.” In McCarthy's brilliant and frightening analysis of that narrative structure, he conflates the role of “collector” and “exterminator” into a single figure. The judge's textualization of the other is depicted as a concurrent erasure of that other. Throughout the novel, we see the efficacy of the judge's text, for it is often the final document of an artifact's existence. In the judge's book we find the ultimate form of textual control in that the very referent has been expunged.

To examine the judge as a “collector” of “vanishing cultures,” a second significant anthropological trope, that of the “objective observer,” necessarily asserts itself. As a synchronizing figure wholly separate from historical processes, the judge plays a role similar to that of traditional anthropologist—Margaret Mead is a primary example—who rhetorically situate themselves as “objective” beings scientifically translating raw data. Clifford argues,

The predominant metaphors in anthropological research have been participant-observation, data collection, and cultural description, all of which presuppose a standpoint outside—looking at, objectifying, or, somewhat closer, “reading,” a given reality.

(11)

On one level, the judge's ethnography maintains the outsider's position, but because his ethnographic surveys are self-defined and self-regulated (he is not anybody's “agent in the field”), he retains dual status as an outsider collecting and as an insider acting, shaping, and creating. In that liminal position between cultural bodies—native and alien—the judge is empowered beyond any insider or outsider. Thus, the trope of “collection” is more than just a figurative device when employed by the judge. In his dual role as transcriber and creator, the judge not only fills in gaps with his textual energies, but he produces the gaps as well.

We see that complex relationship of erasure and inscription throughout the novel, most notably in the scenes where the judge actually engages in collecting expeditions. After tracing into his book several ancient paintings covering a formation of natural stone cisterns, the judge's real work begins: “Then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scrappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been” (173). The drawings in the book thus embody both the capture and the elision of the other; his representations become the artifact when the artifact itself ceases to exist. In a similar scene, the judge scavenges the “ruins of an older culture” (139) for “flint or potsherd or tool of bone” (140) and then sketches them into his book. The critical moment occurs after he sketches a footpiece from a suit of Toledan armor.

When he had done he took up the little footguard and turned it in his hand and studied it again and then he crushed it into a ball of foil and pitched it into the fire. He gathered up the other artifacts and cast them also into the fire … [t]hen he sat with his hands cupped in his lap and he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his counsel had been sought at its creation.

(140)

McCarthy metaphorically encodes acts of writing with acts of violence and destruction; and in that scene, we see the judge's text not only write over other texts, but at the same time effectively unwrite those texts.

In The Step Not Beyond, Maurice Blanchot equates the act of writing with the Eternal Return, for each textual transgression only creates a new mark that must be transgressed anew. In one of the fragments he writes,⁷

The past was written, the future will be read. This could be expressed in this form: what was written in the past will be read in the future, without any relation of presence being able to establish itself between writing and reading.

(30)

In Blanchot's unique conception of the Eternal Return, the present itself is consumed in the very act of writing. “Writing,” then, is without origin and without end; instead, it is a repetitious act that never begins, but instead is always in the process of beginning anew. In its most traditional sense, anthropological writing is understood as a way of preserving, maintaining, collecting, and structuring that which is disappearing or has disappeared. Like McCarthy's judge, however, Blanchot implies that writing is erasure, that it in fact negates the very existence of the “original”:

Writing is not destined to leave traces, but to erase, by traces, all traces, to disappear in the fragmentary space of writing, more definitively than one disappears in the tomb, or again, to destroy, to destroy invisibly, without the uproar of destruction.

(50)

We see a similar cycle of erasure and creation in Blood Meridian, for the judge is forever reborn in his textual enterprise. The judge's ability to write culture stems from his belief that all other writing is inherently meaningless, and that he alone is capable of applying language to the world.

Critic Edwin Arnold, in “Naming, Knowing, and Nothingness: McCarthy's Moral Parables,” aptly describes the judge's textual imperialism: “The heart of the judge's arguments is that life is infinitely fascinating but ultimately has no meaning other than that man imposes on it” (45). From the judge's self-authorized position, he controls and manipulates the application of language. He is the master of interpretation and thus the master of morality, meaning, and order. The judge describes his egoistical position:

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent … he nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures … may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.

(198)

As suzerain, as an overlord or hegemonic force who commands all other forms of power, the judge has complete textual control, and thus the power to strip things naked in the act of naming itself. R. W. B. Lewis suggests that this is an inherent feature of the Adamic personality. He “had to become the maker of his conditions—if he were to have any conditions or any achieved personality at all” (50). The judge forces this notion to its extreme, for anything outside of the conditions he has imposed threatens his text, and therefore he must erase it. However, in that erasure we find a kind of life-in-death for the thing erased, as if the thing still breathes life into the judge's death-causing textual enterprise. During a campfire discussion, someone asks, “What kind of indians has these been here, Judge?” When another voice answers that they are “dead ones,” the judge replies, “Not so dead” (142). They are “not so dead” because they are “alive” in his text, and he is the keeper.

Melville, in Typee,⁸ laments the fate of the lost or disappearing culture through its contaminating contact with modern society, but McCarthy's Blood Meridian contains no such hints of the sentimental. War is finally the only metaphor that describes and defines the judge's textual enterprise, a bloody war between the thing and the judge's capture and conquering of that thing. Steven Shaviro considers the power of the judge's articulated will:

And we might be tempted to say that whereas all the other characters kill casually and thoughtlessly, out of greed or blood lust or some other trivial cause, only the judge kills out of will and conviction and a deep commitment to the cause and the canons of Western rationality.

(114)

It is this very commitment to a cause without end that defines the apocalyptic vision embodied in the judge. For the judge's war is ultimately without telos and without some final boundary it hopes to conquer. Instead, it is a repetitious and perpetual return to its own origin, for there is no transcendence, only war itself.

III

The only character who threatens to usurp the judge's textual order is the kid. His lack of absolute faith in the gang's warfare indicates a moral possibility existing outside the judge's ego. During the final broken movement toward the West Coast in which the kid and the judge exchange gunfire and words, the judge calls out, “There's a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen” (299). Later, after the kid has been imprisoned in San Diego, the judge visits him with similar charges: “You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprise” (307). The kid, perhaps because he was not included in the “terrible covenant” (134) that occurred atop the volcano, is never part of the “communal soul” of the scalp hunters, a soul over which the judge presides as lawgiver and lawmaker. Because the kid has preserved a capacity for judgment, mercy, and morality, he has preserved some portion of himself outside the judge's textual domain.

Some critics have misrepresented the kid's character, positing him as a similar Adamic figure rising from the Earth's clay without origin. The passage cited as evidence for that reading follows his departure from New Orleans: “Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote” (4). That could suggest that the kid has no pre-formed identity, that he is free from the past, without an “originary state” from which to be alienated, as Steven Shaviro argues (112). However, in his origins we find his alliance to a moral code or moral possibility, and that is precisely what threatens the judge's entrepreneurial enterprise. In the novel's opening scene, we gain our only glimpse into the kid's origins, but in that glimpse we acquire our first insights into the kid's “mutiny.” His father, a schoolmaster, “quotes from poets whose names are now lost” (3) while the kid listens. The father then says, “Night of your birth. Thirtythree. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove” (3). In that strange Miltonic statement, the father seems to link his child's birth to celestial motions and divine plottings and also to recall the epic battle between God and Satan in which stars were hurled across the heavens. As we watch “the kid” evolve into “the man,” the morality of those “old poets” survives; and thus he remains fettered to some code or impulse outside the judge's jurisdiction.

The epic battle that the novel charts is ultimately a battle for the kid's soul, a battle pitting the autonomy of the kid's inherited morality against the judge's all-encompassing amoral logos. The first sign that the “old poets” still reside in the kid's heart emerges when he enters Reverend Green's traveling revival tent without any ostensible provocation. That scene also inaugurates the judge's quest for the kid's soul. After he denounces the Reverend as an illiterate pedophile and the revival is effectively squelched, the kid embarks on a drunken rampage that results in at least one fatality and a hotel being set ablaze. As the kid rides out of town, he sees the judge smiling (14), perhaps because he has steered the kid on the “right” path, away from the Reverend and back to “mindless violence” (3)—at least for the time being. In a convincing reading of the Tarot card associated with the kid, the “cuatro de copas” (94), John Sepich argues that its “symbolism suggests a divided heart, and generally associates him with the quality of mercy” (18). Sepich assumes that the judge, as a figure versed in all languages and language structures, is aware of the card's significance. While the prophetess chants, the judge “laugh[s] silently” (94), and the juggler follows the kid's significant glance to the judge, perhaps already aware of the tension between them that stems from the kid's “divided heart.”

Like the confidence trickster that requires the faith of his victims, the judge requires the absolute devotion of his followers. Waldington states,

The confidence trickster not only requires the consent of his victims, but, like a creator, demands belief. Magpie-fashion, the con man collects and adopts all available conventions of thought, action, and language because the confidence game is essentially a ritualization of human intercourse—the transfer of goods or trust between individuals.

(21)

The judge, the ultimate peddler of assurance, relies on the faith of his followers, for they must believe in the “transfer of goods” that he has initiated. A lack of faith in the transaction itself threatens the system, enclosing and encoding it. In his article “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy,” Leo Daugherty argues that the primary component of the judge's character is, of course, judgment, and “like Yahweh, he judges things simply according to the binary criterion of their being inside or outside his will” (125). The reason the kid's capacity for mercy⁹ confounds the judge is its existence outside of his will. Mercy itself is a form of self-reflection, for empathy with the other first requires consideration of the self. Such self-reflection usurps the judge's position as the totalizing will of the Glanton gang and undermines the “body's” unified faith.

Although McCarthy constructs the kid's autonomy as a threat to the judge's textual power, the threat is ultimately an impotent one that only accentuates the totality of the judge's law. The kid finally lacks the Adamic capacity to name and create, and his illiteracy—we are told the kid “can neither read nor write” (3)—functions as a defining feature: he lacks the judge's textual capabilities. The judge claims that language and the knowledge necessary to apply it are the keys to creating and preserving power; thus, the kid's lack of that text-making ability engenders his failure and leads to his death. The expriest Tobin says, “[G]odly wisdom resides in the least of things so that it may well be that the voice of the Almighty speaks most profoundly in such beings as lives in silence themselves” (123-4). Tobin suggests that meekness and “silence” are manifestations of “godly wisdom,” but such wisdom is utterly effete in the face of the judge's textual dominance. The judge, not the silent, ultimately inherit McCarthy's earth.

During the kid's sojourn with the hermit, the impotence of the kid's transgressive morality becomes apparent. The kid states, “I can think of better places and better ways.” The hermit then asks, “Can you make it be?” Without explanation or justification, the kid answers, “No” (19). The kid realizes that he is unable to alter the blood-thirsty, death-dealing machine that the hermit has described; and as the novel continues, we learn that the judge's logos has created and perpetuates it. As Steven Shaviro suggests, “Blood Meridian is not a salvation narrative; we can be rescued neither by faith nor by works nor by grace” (113). Death is the alpha and omega of the novel, and the moral possibility the kid represents is incapable of transcending its boundaries. The kid's inability to tell his story and construct a text, a text perhaps capable of transcending the judge's textual order, manifests itself in his failed confession to the “eldress in the rocks” (305):

He told her that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and that he had no family and that he had traveled much and seen many things and had been at war and endured hardships. He told her that he would convey her to a safe place … for he could not leave her in this place or she would surely die.

(315)

His one chance at redemption by way of apology, confession, self-revelation, and rescue is thwarted by the fact that he whispers his words into the ear of a withered corpse, “a dried shell” (315) unable to register his story.

As the “witness to the uttermost edge of the world,” the judge not only interprets the world and its history, but also creates that world through his ability to apply language, to name. Near the novel's end, strangers mistakenly place the kid (now “the man”) in a similar prophetic role, “but he was no witness to them” (312). In essence, the kid cannot “make it be” like the judge. As the judge says, “It makes no difference what men think of war. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner” (248). The judge embodies the totalizing structure of man's ultimate trade. His continual regeneration through war's textual enterprise is perhaps encapsulated in the novel's thrice repeated, “He says that he will never die” (335). The judge's immortality stems from his violent transgressions. In them we discover that origin and end constitute an eternal cycle, and the judge is the ultimate embodiment of their end-less dance.

Notes

1. Most critics and readers place the kid at the center of the novel, for we follow his travels and his development as a character. However, the text subverts any sense of centeredness: We are not locked into the kid's perspective (though the action always takes place within a fifty mile radius of the kid, give or take a mile), and we have no insights into his thought processes. I have posited the judge as the center of the novel simply because he articulates the scope of the Glanton gang's travels, and he is actually at the heart of the novel's complex epic quest.

2. In his exhaustive study of the Frontier myth in The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin analyzes the cause, effect, and function of such loaded terms as “virgin land,” “wilderness,” and “frontier.” All of them served as “projective fantasies,” as imaginative spaces where the self can be transformed and remade.

3. The primary sources for this notion of a liminal cultural position are Arnold Van Gennep's Rites de Passage (1909) and Victor Turner's The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).

4. McCarthy's fiction, as he admits, is informed by Melville's literary legacy (Moby Dick and the King James Bible were his most-read textual companions). Critics Vereen Bell, Steven Shaviro, and John Sepich all refer to Moby Dick as Blood Meridian's literary precursor, and all draw parallels between the judge and Ahab.

5. By examining ethnographic writing as discursive formations or practices, postmodernist ethnography interrogates its own productions, examining the way a will to “objectivity” is often a concurrent will to power. For some exceptional essays on this subject, see Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George Marcus.

6. Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques (1955) serves as a model example of this ideological pattern. The fledgling anthropologist travels to South America on a collecting expedition, during which he examines four tribes of indigenous peoples—the Caduveo, the Bororo, the Nambikwara, and the Tupi-Kawahib. In his depiction, each tribe is more authentic and less contaminated by civilization than the last, and his journey to “reach the extreme limits of the savage” (332) finally coincides with his own establishment as a “fully fledged anthropologist” (249). In essence, he has found “his” people.

7. In both The Step Not Beyond and The Writing of Disaster, Blanchot employs numerous strategies that disrupt the closure of the text, strategies that “introduce multiplicity into writing,” according to Lycette Nelson. Thus the fragments, the interspersed dialogue between two nameless characters, the different typefaces, among other things, suggest a disruptive writing without a telos, perhaps avoiding the stagnancy of a synchronizing system.

8. Typee follows a progression similar to Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques. Initially we encounter the “corrupted” Marquesan natives who have had contact with Europe. After traveling to the interior of the island (like Levi-Strauss's journey to the interior regions of the Amazon), we discover the “noble savage” (108) existing in a guiltless, eroticized Eden (105).

9. The kid's capacity for mercy asserts itself during the scene in which he is unable, or unwilling, to execute the wounded boy from Kentucky, Shelby.

Works Cited

Blanchot, Maurice. The Step Not Beyond. Trans. Lycette Nelson. Albany: State U of New York P, 1992. Originally published as Le Pas Au-Dela by Editions Gallimard, 1973.

Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 98-121.

———. “Partial Truths.” Introduction to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Ed. James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 1-26.

Crapanzano, Vincent. “Hermes' Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986. 51-76.

Daugherty, Leo. “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy.” Southern Quarterly 30.4 (Summer 1992): 130-39.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. Tristes Tropiques. 1955. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1955.

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

Melville, Herman. Typee. New York: Signet, 1964.

Sepich, John. “‘What kind of indians was them?’: Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Southern Quarterly 30.4 (Summer 1992): 101-18.

———. “The Dance of History in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Southern Literary Journal 24 (Fall 1991): 16-31.

Shaviro, Steven. “‘The Very Life of Darkness’: A Reading of Blood Meridian.” Southern Quarterly 30.4 (Summer 1992): 119-29.

Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization 1800-1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985.

Waldington, Warwick. The Confidence Game in American Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.