Abstract
Hillier begins his study proper with Blood Meridian. This second chapter focuses upon the novel’s outstanding instance of evil, the indomitable, hairless, twenty-four-stone albino giant Judge Holden, a living paradox of Enlightenment sophistication and vicious barbarism. Hillier enquires into the Judge’s design, which consists of the calculated way in which the Judge spreads his bad influence throughout the narrative as he contaminates others with his ideas and asserts his suzerainty by binding the members of the Glanton gang, and others, to his will. Through close reading and a consideration of McCarthy’s inventive appropriation of and engagement with, among others, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons, the synoptic gospels, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Jacob Boehme’s philosophy of religion, Hillier explores the Judge’s diabolism and, in the words of the frockless ex-priest Tobin, “Give[s] the devil his due” (131). As the architect of the blood meridian, the Judge is a wolf in shepherd’s clothing, whose design instills a vicious gospel of hatred and egotism, impels human resentment and antipathy, and foments chaos. In playing the smiling villain, and murdering while he smiles, McCarthy’s diabolic Judge has the demerit of earning a place at the table with literature’s most mischievous malefactors, including Christopher Marlowe’s Barabas, William Shakespeare’s Iago, Milton’s Satan, Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov, and Joseph Conrad’s Mistah Kurtz.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In the illuminating second chapter of Mundik’s recent study A Bloody and Barbarous God she unravels the mystery of the Judge as “a composite of the Great Evil in all its guises, drawing on the traditions of the Judeo-Christian Satan, the Islamic djinns, the Hindu Shiva, the Buddhist Mara, a Gnostic archon, and a literary personification of Fate, Time, and Death itself” (52).
- 2.
McCarthy is working with not one, but at least two intertexts here. As well as alluding to Dostoevsky’s Demons, he is subverting the pilgrim Christian’s encounter with the shepherds at the Delectable Mountains in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. See Hillier “Dark Parody” 56.
- 3.
Chamberlain’s account of the Paso el Diablo and its connection with the Legend of San Patricio and the Devil may have further contributed to McCarthy’s conception of the malpais and its volcanic terrain. According to Chamberlain, the “Paso el Diablo is a strange freak of nature, a pass or canyon through the Sierra Madre…of volcanic origin [that formed when] the Devil sprang through the mountain to his subterranean abode” (69–70) to avoid the holy water administered by the holy padre.
- 4.
The Judge’s quotation hews closely to Petronius’s original Latin, which reads, “Terra mater est in medio quasi ovum corrotundata, et omnia bona in se habet tanquam favus” (Satyricon 39).
- 5.
McCarthy seems suspicious of education and sophistication as trustworthy guarantees of humaneness and moral probity. Of Angel Trias, Governor of Chihuahua, the narrator remarks, “the governor had been sent abroad as a young man for his education and was widely read in the classics and was a student of languages” (175). Although the sophisticated Governor Trias is “a man among men” (175), the arrival of the scalp-hunting band “in their gory rags” (172) stirs Governor Trias’s baser instincts and “seemed to warm something in him” (176).
- 6.
Mundik reads the coin-trick in Gnostic terms as the Judge’s demiurgic demonstration of “the terrible force of heimarmene” (“Striking” 84) and his project “to bring about the total ‘enslavement of man’” (“Striking” 82). All of the Judge’s horrendous acts are, to adopt Dwight Eddins’s phrase, “acts of conscienceless appropriation” (30). For close critical analyses of the Judge’s brutal and sinister method of claiming and appropriation, see Wallach “Archon” 125–35 and Masters 25–37.
- 7.
This portion of the chapter is based on research originally published by Taylor & Francis as Russell M. Hillier, “The Judge’s Molar: Infanticide and the Meteorite in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West,” ANQ 26.2 (2013): 76–81.
- 8.
Nova Vulgata 1804–05.
- 9.
As we will see in Chapter Six, in No Country for Old Men Anton Chigurh has an equally reductive view of human life. Chigurh dispatches his victims with an air-powered cattle gun, as if they were beeves in a slaughterhouse (106–07).
- 10.
Shane Schimpf links Blood Meridian’s “husbandman” with Cain, who biblically “was a tiller of the ground” (Gen. 4:2; see Schimpf 63).
- 11.
McCarthy insinuates that the Judge instigates the melee at the Beehive. When the kid, now a man, first looks across the bar “the judge had risen and was speaking with other men”; when the man looks a second time, “the judge was not there. The showman seemed to be in altercation with the men” (339).
- 12.
Spencer has recognized the novel’s “implied intermingling of [male] sexuality, violence, and evil,” and he even describes the white, bald, hairless, and distended Judge as “a phallic symbol” (103–4).
- 13.
The insistent, ominous motif of the Judge’s dark, “crooked smile” (99) and his glinting teeth occurs, among other instances, at 15, 83, 89, 97, 99, 122, 208, 229, 240, 296, 318, 319, 320, 340, and 347.
- 14.
Blood Meridian is shot through with Miltonic traces. Elsewhere Glanton’s gang leaves the slaughter of the Gileños “like the harried afterguard of some ruined army retreating across the meridians of chaos and old night” (169), words that recall “the Reign of Chaos and old Night” (Paradise Lost 1.543). Both works arguably operate at the level of theodicy, justifying or at least striving to comprehend God’s ways, although some might argue that Blood Meridian is an indictment rather than a defense of God’s ways to men, for which argument see Douglas. An inquiry into Blood Meridian as theodicy is still ripe for further exploration.
- 15.
Steven Shaviro extends this theory further to include all of Glanton’s gang: “Glanton and his men…have no spirit of seriousness or of enterprise; they unwittingly pursue self-ruin rather than advantage. All these men—and not just the kid—are childlike in their unconsciousness, or indifference, as to motivations and consequences” (154).
- 16.
See, for example, Bell 129 and Phillips 28–36.
- 17.
Earlier, in comparable phrasing, the narrator suggests the gang’s forsakenness through a simile, when the muleteers on the precipice also face Glanton’s gang “like men themselves at the mercy of something terrible (204).”
Bibliography
–––. “The Judge’s Molar: Infanticide and the Meteorite in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West.” ANQ 26.2 (2013): 76–81. Print.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hillier, R.M. (2017). “Give the Devil His Due”: Judge Holden’s Design in Blood Meridian. In: Morality in Cormac McCarthy's Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46957-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46957-7_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-46956-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-46957-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)