Judge Holden

Tell the smarty pansies to fuck off tbqh.

Corncob's Self-insert.

I don't think its that simplistic. A more simplistic interpretation would be that he was Satan or Death, alluded to with the Paradise Lost reference aswell as the "Et In Arcadia Ego" quote

War is god according to the judge and he's not the most trustworthy fellow.

>spiritual embodiment
wew

What's the difference?

Ah, so he was a government agent.

He was white

Also physical.

Why was his name Judge?

(and why Holden?)

Holding judgement?

withholding judgement?

Judge holding (eye of beholder)?

>my name is Judge Holden, or as my friends call me, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West

Fucking really?

the demiurge

>Fucking really?
>I am a genius who will write a great metaphorical and symbolic novel and I will name one of the main characters Pete, because it would be impossible for me to think to choose a name for my character which could have any possible meaning and its impossible for names to ever mean something

Those arent simplistic readings, those are nonsense readings that are not only objectively wrong, but even their systems of analysis are also objectively wrong.
Calling him a spiritual embodiment of anything is a weak reading.

The judge is the only thing you can trust :•)

Those shit name websites tell me Holden means "Hollow Valley" and "Gracious" so that's kinda cool

He is a convenient character that can explain all the future knowledge and understanding of things these people never had any chance of having/getting.

The book would be fucking Avengers film tier shitshow if it didn't have judge and he was split into existing characters

Ah yes, the famous scene from Blood Meridian where the Judge, you can tell it's the Judge because of his staple well sculpted but blushing face, has sex with the man while smoking a cigar, holding his favorite worms, and staring straight ahead, unmoved by the situation of sex, worms, and smoke.

He's called Holden because he's 'Holden' the leash of that kid he brings with him.

That's the retard on a leash senpai, pretty sure that scene was in the book

Holy... I want war.

What is it supposed to be where the Indians come into his room and he's waiting for them naked?
I'd that the point of the stupid stare?
I guess I see the leash now.
Every drawing Of the judge I've seen always looks like shit. How can someone read the book and then draw that?

I immediately picture a naked John Malkovich covered in white paint when I think of the Judge.

He set the standard. He was the epitome of violence, and could rightly judge others for not following his example.

He despised the kid, who was happy to embark on bloody, senseless, murder of innocents, but refused to even attempt to kill the judge, or shoot comrades out of mercy. The kid represented that weird contradiction in human conflict, the odd ideas of honor and compassion in the midst of pure violence.

The judge represented a purity, the natural order of violence, without bizarre human ideas to screw it up.

I picture him kinda like Mozgus from Berserk.
Feels pretty similar in attitude as well.

E'S A BIG BAAAAAAAABEH

>Holden means "Hollow Valley" and "Gracious"
Interesting, thanks mate.

So, Judge of hollow valley (shadow of the valley of death?)(emptiness? barren?)

A gracious judge? A judger of graciousness?

As a side note, any other McCarthy book you'd recommend?

Chaos, absolute freedom, immorality, desire incarnate?

Reading Child of God rn it's fantastic

A

F*CKING

WHITE

MALE

>He despised the kid, who was happy to embark on bloody, senseless, murder of innocents, but refused to even attempt to kill the judge, or shoot comrades out of mercy

Was there a near 100% chance the kid could have killed the judge?

Meaning the judge despised the kid for not killing him?

I'd assumed it was when he was walking through the desert looking for The Kid. But yeah there aren't many illustrations of The Judge and most of them are shitty.

Thanks m8

The Road is good too but it's a hell of a downer.

Suttree

Why was he trying to kill the kid?

The kid had a semblance of good human will within him. The Judge noticed this. Remember when the kid was the only one to help the man with the arrow in his leg in the Glanton Gang? Remember how the kid, when left behind by the gang, was alone in the wilderness, trudging through snow? He possessed an insatiable human will to survive. The Judge couldn't corrupt him fully. He was away from the Judge's presence in those passages, in the snowy woodland.Meanwhile, everyone else in the Gang, in the presence of The Judge, thew their morality out the window. The Judge represents evil and all its avenues: greed, rapacious desire for control, murder, rape. His presence alone corrupts all in his vicinity (the man shooting the bear at the end).

Notice also how The Kid near the end of the book, when he's picked up by the Sherrif, goes into a fit of crazed delirium as he recalls everything he and Glanton Gang did.

A man with a cold and a smoking habit.

Yahweh.

He is El Diablo.

>call something simplistic
>don't give an alternative

I think there's a spooky moment where this is implied, during the Kid and the Judge's gunfight, right after Tobin has been shot. They shoot at each other at the same time, and the Kid aims very carefully. This is after being told that the Kid is a "dead-eye" shot. But after shooting, the Kid looks up and the Judge has simply vanished like magic. It seems like the shot would've killed the Judge if he didn't have teleporting powers.

A self important madman

I feel like Holden is a representation of the frontiersman used to contrast with Hollywood depictions of the righteous cowboy. The Hollywood cowboy is just, fair and brings order to an uncivilised land... he also treats women with respect.

Holden brings chaos, disorder, violence and rape as well as intentionally cataloging and destroying the future. Holden is the unspoken darkness of the pioneer which is ignored by American pop culture. He is also a fucking badass.

Well the smarty pantses I was referring to theorized that he's a gnostic archon, but I don't subscribe to that myself.

I bet you think the book is about manifest destiny

A character in a story

Blood Meridian is not a deconstruction of Hollywood Westerns & I'm sorry that you seem to think it is.

I enjoyed Outer Dark

Recc'd this yesterday but All the Pretty Horses

He is called holden because he rips sick skids in a maccas parking lot

*spits dryly*

*glanton spat*
Ayo hol up hol up
*massacres entire peaceful injun settlement *
So you be sayin
*scalps mexican children*
We finna
*glanton spat*

dude
what if
what if, hear me out
what if glanton was ahab
and the judge
the judge is the whale
and the kid...
is ISHMAEIL

More that it is critical of that kind of idea

Not a deconstruction but a antithesis kinda. Rather than feel sorry for me give me a decent alternative faggot.

It's not specifically about the idea of manifest destiny, colonialism or Hollywood, seriously what the fuck
see
McCarthy wrote it to be his moby dick, like it and heart of darkness it's about the nature of man

Not specifically colonialism, manifest destiny or Hollywood but is definately informed by all those things and more. To say the judge represents evil and violence is a given and leads nowhere

" Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing."

There's your answer. To try and simplify him to a source, or even to all of his apparent sources is folly. The Judge becomes a being greater than any one aspect of his alluded nature.

Can you tell us a bit more?
Why would he be an archon?

I read this a few years ago, sitting at my desk while not doing my old job. All I remember are the boring descriptions of landscapes.

But is he magical? Or was he a mortal, ordinary man with strange qualities?

I think it's almost impossible to consider him purely ordinary, if only because the greatness of his nature wills him not to be so. There's a lot of debate as to whether the Kid can actually kill the Judge or not, regardless of whether he fires on the Judge, and even that is a question onto itself-- Whether anyone can attack the Judge in a physical manner. From that, the debate becomes whether he is physical at all, or wholly metaphysical/metaphorical-- And this is the kind of argument (usually centered around the scene at the jakes) which usually leads nowhere, and with no-one feeling any the wiser, and with everyone all the more livid at the opposite camp.

Fuck... I havent even read the book. (I dont care about spoilers)

Im just saying, what is up with this vanishing fooey? Makes the OPs question all the more interesting... what the hell is this story, magical realism... the judge is real and not... or the book is anime? Or myth

Thats a really good explanation thanks

Has Mr.McCarthy ever been grilled about all these questions, his views on it all?

McCarthy has always been notorious for declining interviews and public readings, up until very recently (his interview with Oprah after the release of The Road was pretty hyped as a major literary event for that reason). In the Oprah interview for instance, she never asks him any deep questions on the content of the novel, only because she is interested on focusing on his life details and philosophy of not-working (she basically outs him as a NEET). So no, I don't believe he has ever been confronted seriously and deeply in an interview about Blood Meridian's implications and meanings and purposes of allusion, if only because he's sort of declined such interviews almost wholesale.

Suttree and All The Pretty Little Horses are regarded as his patrician ones, No Country For Old Men and The Road are his more pleb friendly ones

Here's probably his most interesting interview/overview, written by Richard B. Woodward for the New York Times in 1992:

nytimes.com/1992/04/19/magazine/cormac-mccarthy-s-venomous-fiction.html?pagewanted=all

I think the most interesting quote from the interview regarding Blood Meridian is that:

''"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed," McCarthy says philosophically. "I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."'

He also makes a point about books being made of other books, which is key to understanding the point of his use of allusion in Blood Meridian.

Am I going crazy or isn't his name "Judge Holden" because that was literally his name in Samuel Chamberlain's autobiographical "My Confession"?

As in, at least by Chamberlain's account, there was a person named that in Glanton's gang?

I thought it had something to do with Caulfield, too
The same aimless destructive wandering

Shitposting was always here. Before man was, shitposting waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate autist.

Interesting, he has no even friends, literary friends, academia friends, professors, who have talked with him about it at dinner

maybe all the critics and readers read into things much more than he was even aware of, so its best for him to not speak about it, because they know more about it than him

>Am I going crazy

Maybe
>Am I more knowledgeable on the subject than all of you

The book contains supernatural elements but they are very subtle. Not just the Judge, but also various forms of divination and synchronicity. The Gypsy fortune-teller, for example, predicts the Glanton gang's fate. I think the Judge is supposed to exist "outside" the story, in some sense. It's like he's invaded the book itself in his quest for supremacy. But he's not all-powerful, especially in his inability to convince everyone (notably, the Kid) to conform to the metaphysical order he represents.

It's not my theory, so I'll just quote from Leo Daugherty's essay which I believe was one of the first voices on the subject:

"Early in Blood Meridian, the reader comes upon this passage: "The survivors slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night" (46). Anareta was believed in the Renaissance to be "the planet which destroys life," and "violent deaths are caused" when the "malifics" have agents in "the anaretic place'' (OED entry, "anareta"). Because McCarthy has not placed a comma after "pilgrims," it is likely that his simile includes the entire remainder of the phrase; yet it is easily possible to read the passage as if a comma were present, thus producing the reading: this is Anareta. Either way, the implication is clearly that our own Earth is Anaretic. And in Blood Meridian, the Earth is the judge's.

Even so, on our own evil planet Judge Holden's power is not yet complete, since his will is not yet fulfilled in its passion for total domination. He is working, as he implies to Toadvine, to become a full "suzerain"one who "rules even where there are other rulers," whose authority "countermands local judgements" (198). Yet this was also necessarily true of the Gnostic archons, just as it was true of the Old Testament Yahweh, whom they saw as evil. And, like those archons, Holden also possesses all the other characteristics of Yahweh as the Gnostics saw him: he is jealous, he is vengeful, he is wrathful, he is powerful and—most centrally—he possesses, and is possessed by, a will. And he is enraged by any existence or any act outside that will."

"At one point, he places his hands on the ground, looks at Toadvine, and speaks:

This is my claim, he said. 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)

In Holden, the stressed archonic element is of course judgment. Yet, like Yahweh, he judges things simply according to the binary criterion of their being inside or outside his will. In one of the passages most crucial to an adequate understanding of Blood Meridian, he tells David Brown, "Every child knows that play is nobler than work," that "Men are born for games" and that "all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all" (249). We are reminded here of the novel's epigraph from Jacob Boehme: "It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness." Indeed, war is the ultimate cause of unity, involving as it does the "testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will [i.e., war itself] which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god" (249).

And it is the warrior judge's work to achieve dominion—to be the realized territorial archon of this Anaretic planet—through becoming the totalizing victor in all conflicts, real and perceptual, involving his will. The corollary is to show no mercy to those others whose wills have led them to be outside one's own: as Holden tells the kid late in the novel, "There's a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen" (299). And because the kid has shown them mercy, the judge must not show him any—and does not. Ultimately, a person serves the god of war, as Holden tells Tobin, in order to be "no godserver but a god himself" (250)."

...

>The Gypsy fortune-teller, for example, predicts the Glanton gang's fate

What do you think the point of this was (being in the book?

To show that, due to their actions and ways, with some effort, their (negative) future was predictable? How did they react to the fortune telling?

>This is my claim, he said. 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.

So... the Judge read Stirner

thanks for posting those two posts!

You should really read the book (assuming you're the guy who said he hasn't). Here's something the Judge says:
>The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.
The Gypsy is basically predicting this cyclical principle will manifest for Glanton and his gang. Their peak will entail their fall. Glanton wants to believe he is a self-contained will, not subject to such laws. So he reacts violently when the Gypsy suggests this.

You think McCarthy has read the critiques of him?

probably not but if he did he wouldn't let on anyway

Psh.. Nothin personnel... The Kid

Literally everyone thinks that and it's not because they're experts on gnosticism. It's not a position that anyone you've talked to has come to on his own

kek... is Blood Meridian the one book that EVERYONE on Veeky Forums has read?

Just finished that. Gave a copy to my dad before I'd read it and deeply regretted it so after getting to all the incest and necrophilia

Whatever he is physically, he's the perfect union of man's higher and lower natures. He's what you get when you combine a perfectly untrammeled animal id with a perfectly developed genius-level intellect and remove all psychosomatic conflict between these higher and lower natures