I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian a few days ago. I'm not sure what to make of it. Upon first setting the novel down, in the immediate aftermath of the murder in the outhouse and the gleeful pirouettes of the towering, albino Judge, I felt certain I had just finished reading something weighted with great meaning. I considered what, exactly Judge Holden stands for. Is it evil? Is it violence? Are these two things different (I think not...)
An interesting passage (the pontificating is Holden's, the laconic responses, the kid’s):
I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?
You aint nothin.
You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.
Even a dumb animal can dance.
The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that dont."
........
“The dance,” life and conflict, as seen through the Judge’s warped paradigm, is always a violent thing. Without war (can I use war interchangeably with violence? I think I can...), the dance is meaningless to him. This makes sense literally, if he is a personification of violence. Were life not inherently violent, he would, of course, not be any part of it.
The phrase starting, “And yet there will be one...,” is difficult to parse through. At first, it seemed sloppily written to me, but I think I’ve figured something out about it, so far as I have been able. The phrase is ostensibly self-referential, and this is reinforced by the kid’s response – “You ain’t nothin.”. If it is true, though, that Judge Holden is he “who is a true dancer,” then he is the less for it. For then he is only one man among many, and two things call this possibility into question. First, textually, the Judge’s response, “You speak truer than you know,” indicates that he accepts the kid’s charge of his being nothing, and by accepting this he imbues himself with the intangibility and omnipotence of a god. Second, we have already seen that the book sets him up as a symbol for violence, that it is of this that his godhood consists, and so he has long since ceased to appear to be only one man.
So, that “one” does not refer to the Judge, but instead, I think, refers to the kid. The Judge gives himself away when he says “Hear me man.” His last big speech is an entreaty to the only figure in the book not completely taken by his philosophy. It seems to me that, despite the fact that Holden wins the physical fight at the end, he fails here in his final attempts to persuade the kid to accept life by his rules, the rules of violence.
What good comes of this, though? The kid still ends his life little more than a mess left in the bathroom by the previous occupant. He rejects the logic of war only to become its victim.
Violence wins again. It dictates the order of nature. I wonder, this truism, that violence is inescapable, is it adult reality or childish fantasy? I can imagine Dick Cheney’s answer to this question. I can imagine the answer of the man who recently suggested to me that we should have sent the army into Iran during the hostage crisis, or that we should nuke the same country as a sort of punishment for their atomic ambitions, welcome them to the welcome them to the elite group of bomb-holding nations.
Is a world without war possible, I think, is what I'm trying to get at. If it is possible, then the book (or, at least, the Judge and all the characters subsumed by his all-encompassing violence-as-character) seems to lack the moral imagination necessary to conjure what such a world might look like.
To answer this question, it is necessary to understand what are the causes of war, of violence. This is a question that, by my first reading, doesn’t seem to be present in McCarthy’s book (written later- on second thought, the Judge's story about the salesman and the traveller delves into this territory). Violence is....what? Action without empathetic regard? Or action that works against what a moment of empathy would illuminate? I think I’ll take that. I prefer a broader definition than something that would be provided by a more physical definition.
So what causes a lack of empathy? Ignorance seems an obvious answer. Fear, too, comes to mind. And most importantly, violence is typically a reaction to violence, is it not? Fear, I think, is itself caused by violence. People fear terrorism because of violence. They fear illegal immigration because they fear losing their own jobs, a fear that is itself caused by the violence done upon them by their employers, cutting benefits, downsizing to maximize profit, etc.
Hmmm... Argument needs work. A good start, though.
Anyways, it has been commented that there is no interiority to any of the characters in this novel. There is no empathy for us to have, then. Any empathy we, as readers, feel depends on our constructing an inner life for these hellish men that simply isn't present on the page. There are a few moments that belie this point. I wonder if they do, truly, or if they are purposely misleading.
For example, the moment in which Toadvine threatens to shoot the Judge for murdering the Apache child. The scene is made more terrible because the Judge has acted lovingly toward the youth for a few pages or so; he bounces the child on his knee, plays with him, and he is scalped the next morning. An indignant Toadvine sticks a gun in the Judge’s face. Now, does he act out of a moral sense for the child’s well-being or out of societal assumptions that killing children is wrong? Seeing as Toadvine has, at this point, participated in the slaughter of whole camps of Indians, the first seems unlikely. Rather, it appears he has only been psychologically trained to be disgusted by the Judge’s breaking of a rule of civilization. The Judge's refusal to acknowledge any difference between murdering a child and murdering adults (I think I agree with this, by the way) reminds Toadvine that his morality is a fool's morality, and he lowers the gun.
I actually think the first of the two possibilities is true. True enough, Toadvine's decision not to kill the Judge, I think, is because he sees the hypocricy of his threat, comes to realize that his only reason for feeling disgust is that the Judge has broken a social convention by loving and then murdering a child and that this is little different from his (Toadvine's) own murderous activities (probably including the murder of children, without the knee-bouncing). However, as for his first impulse to confront the Judge, it is more the case that Holden’s display of affection served to humanize the child for a moment and this led to Toadvine's caring for his well-being. It is empathy that prompts Toadvine’s rebellion, but it is quickly suppressed, and he decides not to shoot.
This is what seems to happen.
I can’t decide if this moment is meant to emphasize the decision not to shoot (and the idea that morals are only social norms) or the urge to shoot in the first place (in which case there is a hint of empathy in the novel, however brief). I lean towards the first, but accept the second as possible.
A quick note: I recognize the contradiction that connects Toadvine’s urge to kill the Judge with empathy (and, therefore, peace, as I’ve defined it). Remember, though, the Judge is not a real being. He is violence personified, not a living, breathing man with thoughts and emotions of his own. Doing violence to him is not violence at all, since there is no interiority to be had there, and thus nothing to empathize with. It is worth mentioning that such a man does not exist in reality. A description of the Judge: “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 millenia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing” (309-10). I read this two ways. Either, the Judge – violence – has always existed and always will, or, by his own words, is nothing at all, a childish fantasy.
-------
Another thought-
If violence is a lack of empathy, then book, Judge, and violence are one in the same.
I like this idea, but I think it’s questionably true. If the book itself IS violence, then it's effect would have to be damaging to my psyche somehow (since what else could it affect?), and I'm not convinced that it is. Violence only begets more violence; does the book do this? Not as far as I can see.
And that leaves me puzzled. If the book is violent and ultimately vacuous, inflating its own self-worth, than I remain skeptical of its greatness; beauty, yes, and wealth of ideas, sure, but hollow, in the end. I’m unsure whether this is or isn’t the case.
Finished 12/27/09
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