June 10, 2020

Finished Blood Meridian covid-19: day 89 | US: GA | info | act

“ The violence is the book. The Judge is the book, and the Judge is, short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature. The Judge is violence incarnate. The Judge stands for incessant warfare for its own sake. ” — Harold Bloom

Something strikes me about Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian as more apposite today than when it was written. Maybe, as the interview points out, McCarthy was aware of a resurgence of the power of evangelical Christianity, but the mid-eighties seemed to me (what the hell did I know as a 16-year-old?) as a more placid time when compared to the fractious, post-fact world where God’s most devoted seem to be doing the devil’s work. This might be another way of saying: the Judge, while obviously a mythical antagonist, did not seem as horrific as I expected.

Maybe it’s that the whole narrative has a Biblical, epical, or fabalistic quality to it that removes it from the quotidian and mitigates its violence. David Vann calls it an “American Inferno,” likening McCarthy’s surrealistic landscapes with those of Dante: “Hell here is an open desert landscape, an endless journey past demonic shapes and beings living and dead.” Indeed, since the kid is shot at the beginning of the novel, and this might be his own journey through hell, except without the benefit of a Virgil—only accompanied and later pursued by the devil himself in the form of a seven-foot-tall, bald albino calling himself the Judge.

Virgil might be missing because this is virginal hell—one that has grown out of a new form of savageness in the American west. Dante’s La comedia is also a redemption story, but you’ll get nothing like that here. Is America newly damned in the mid-eighties, or has it always been so? The Judge is both Ahab and the white whale—a monstrous baby Shiva that dances the destruction of all he sees.

. . .

Works Cited

• Pierce, Leonard (June 15, 2009). "Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian". AV Club. Retrieved 2020-06-11.
• Vann, David (November 13, 2009). "American Inferno". The Guardian. Retrieved 2020-06-11.