Upon reading “Blood Meridian”

Be forewarned. The following contains spoilers.

The other day I finished Blood Meridian. How exactly I came to it I’m not entirely sure. Partly it must have been having seen No Country for Old Men a little while ago; partly it must have been Harold Bloom’s enthusiastic recommendation. The more I read about it before touching the thing itself, the clearer it became that the central focus and attraction of the book would be the judge, and so indeed it turned out. The first time we meet him, at a revival meeting, he announces to a crowd that the preacher at the pulpit is a fraud, and that he had been run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat, and that he was also wanted for violating children. So far, the judge is merely interesting, and we wonder a little about him and how he came to know these things. But then the crowd begin to ask him questions, to which he answers only negatively.

Judge, how did you come to have the goods on that no-account?

Goods? said the judge.

When was you in Fort Smith?

Fort Smith?

Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?

You mean the Reverend Green?

Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come but here.

I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was.

They looked from one to the other.

Well where was it you run up on him?

I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.

He raised his glass and drank.

There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.

Now we are fascinated. What business, then, did he have announcing that the preacher was a fraud? He is called “the judge”: might that have anything to do with it? But as the book progresses, he only becomes an even greater mystery. He appears, to those who don’t know him, to be a charming and extraordinary man. He is certainly intelligent, and he is far more widely learned than most. Another character, the expriest, tells the book’s protagonist, the kid, the circumstances under which he first met the judge, and goes on to tell of all his preternatural abilities in every area of human endeavour that he dabbles in. When he draws, he draws such perfect likenesses that the subjects fear their soul is captured in the paper, and that if the paper were to be destroyed, they too would be destroyed. He can out-dance the devil himself. He is the greatest fiddler the expriest has ever seen and that’s an end to it. He holds forth on all topics that can be held forth on: palaeontology, geography, history. He appears to know all languages spoken by all people he comes across. In short, we are given to think he excels in everything he does, and that there must be something preternatural, and therefore something to be feared, about the man.

But these might just be statistics. It is also his uncanny way of being in the right place at the right time, even when the circumstances seem to have conspired against it. The expriest first sees him in the middle of a desert plain, sitting on a lone rock, without a horse or a canteen. His apparent ability to live without food or water is witnessed again later on, under stranger circumstances. When the gang of scalphunters that is the central collective of the book find themselves without ammunition and under attack by Apache Indians, he fashions gunpowder from the minerals around him, in combination with the urine of the gang. None of the attacking Indians survive.

Then there is the moment when we find out the judge, having played in a fatherly fashion with an Apache boy by a campfire, has killed and scalped the boy. He later seriously espouses the view that children should be put in a pit with wild dogs, and that they should be set to puzzle out from their proper clues the one of three doors that does not harbour wild lions.

The whole novel, it turns out, is a slow and tense build-up to the apocalyptic moment when the Glanton gang is massacred by the Yuma Indians. All pretences, such as they were, are from this time defenestrated, and the surviving members’ ambivalence towards the judge, though he was perfectly aware of them all along, are laid fully and irrevocably bare. Before this time, there were several opportunities to kill the judge, and we are not told why they are not taken. There is a terrifying and relentless sequence in which the judge follows the kid. I know you would not hide, he says. I know too that you’ve not the heart of a common assassin. I’ve passed before your gunsights twice this hour and will pass a third time. Why not show yourself?

Painting of the judge giving a lecture on geology, by Samuel Chamberlain, whose account of the real-life judge strongly influenced the fictional one.

Perhaps what is most terrifying about the judge is just how mysterious he is. We don’t know why he “outs” the preacher in the first chapter, and we don’t know why he insists on being accompanied by an imbecile in the latter third of the book. And we don’t really know why he draws everything he sees in his notebook, even though he tells us that whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent, and that recording them in some way effectively destroys them forever. (Though of course, that may be his entire raison d’être: perhaps he really did know the preacher, and what we saw was the culmination of revenge, resulting in the preacher’s being erased from existence.) But what compels us about him is not that he is mysterious, it’s that his mystery feels somehow truthful, and more, feels as though it is a dark truth. This in itself is mysterious, since the philosophy he professes doesn’t strike me as remotely sound. It can be summarised as “war is god”: he believes that all trades and endeavours are subservient to the trade of war and, echoing Nietzsche, that morality is merely an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favour of the weak. Sound or unsound, his philosophy seems to emerge the victor at the book’s close, which sees him dancing naked towering above other dancers, after the presumed murder of the kid. This might imply to many readers that his philosophy really is truth, but that would, I think, be a misreading. The judge fascinates partly because he makes us think of him as something closer to a force of nature than a product of it, that he is speaking from a realm beyond ours, beyond good and evil. That is an alluring trait, but it is after all only a trait, and not evidence of the truth-value of his philosophy.

Cormac McCarthy is an elusive author, both in this book and in real life. It seems unlikely that he will ever hand us the answer to the riddle that is the judge, if he knows it himself. But that is all to the good: the immense value of Blood Meridian, it seems to me, is that we are presented with such a fascinating riddle, and we are maddened in trying to work out the answer. If you haven’t already, I urge you to go out and read this book.