Manifest Destiny
Blood Meridian takes place against Manifest Destiny, a 19th-century American imperialism and territorial expansion program. America’s commitment to Manifest Destiny motivated the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. It becomes a central event in the book where Cormac McCarthy dramatizes the atrocity and insincerity of imperialism and Manifest Destiny. The book shows that the true personification of the imperialist testament is not what Captain White calls an instrument of emancipation.
Still, McCarthy grounded his treatment of the Glanton Gang on literal records. In 1849, a man named John Joel Glanton led a gang. A man named Judge Holden supports the gang contracted to butcher the Apaches in Mexico. After that, the gang fled to Arizona rather than kill Mexicans for their scalps. In 1850, they captured the Yuma Crossing of the Colorado River. McCarthy’s leading source on the Glanton Gang is Samuel Chamberlain’s 19th-century bio, My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue.
Chamberlain reminisces about his misfortunes and adventures as a soldier in the Mexican-American War. In addition, he also shared in the Glanton Gang crown-stalking passage. He described Judge Holden as a giant man, Glanton’s alternate-in-command, a cold-thoroughbred felonious with eyes like a gormandizer about to glow with the sullen ferocity of a devil’s face.
MacArthur Fellowship
McCarthy avoided allegations that the atrocity and violence he described were theatrical or pessimistic by grounding his book on historical records. According to him, humans can perform similar acts and always will. McCarthy grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee (despite being born in Rhode Island). When he was young, he attended Catholic schools and worked as an altar boy at the Church of the Immaculate Conception.
Latterly, he incorporated the sounds and sights of Tennessee into his book. Numerous of his works also treat what has been called Catholic nostalgia. During this time, McCarthy attended the University of Tennessee throughout the 1950s. Although he never completed his degree, he published his first short stories. He wrote scenarios and novels from the 1960s to the 70s, breathing on subventions and literacy.
In 1981, McCarthy won his loftiest award, MacArthur Fellowship, thanks to Blood Meridian. The book marks a change in his works. Similar turns became apparent as one of the exemplifications, videlicet No Country for Old Men (famously acclimated to the screen by the Coen brothers). McCarthy published Blood Meridian in 1985, incorporating erudite stripes to show the violence associated with Western expansion rather than opining on ethics.
The Western story is set in the 1850s.
Anti-western Literature
However, the narrative does not present the lousy guy versus the good guy, a famed script with which most Western compendiums are familiar. Literary critics labeled the book anti-Western, a picaresque novel in which characters jump from one grand adventure to another. Nowadays, people hail the book as the Great American Novel. The novel’s main character is “the kid,” a teenage boy who has run from home.
The kid wanders southwest until he eventually meets Judge Holden. The kid joins a gang of robbers on a charge of stealing cattle. Nevertheless, numerous outlaws were killed on the group’s first incursion into Mexico. The kid survives and is locked until Judge Holden frees him. The judge also introduces the kid to mercenaries dealing Native American scalps to local officers. The judge negotiated the trade of the crown.
It became the driving force behind the group. After the mercenaries got involved in violent meetings with members of the Apache lineage, numerous of the group’s adjudicators were killed. The group split, but the kid survived the violence. He left what was left of the group. Nonetheless, he has one last hassle with Judge Holden years later. Over time, the judge has cultivated a grudge against the kid since their last meeting.
Judge Holden
Judge Holden tells the kid that he has seen him show mercy towards soldiers on previous expeditions. It becomes an act that symbolizes failure in the judge’s worldview. The judge says the capability to kill without mercy makes one almighty. Incontinently, he kills the kid during a violent hassle in the restroom. Blood Meridian became one of the most violent, widely read books ever written in English.
The proximity focuses on lawlessness and violence, particularly the part of the Judge Holden gang in making a living through the barbaric practice of scalping for bounties. Killing became such a large part of their lives that their first instinct was to kill anyone they encountered. Thus, it is a woeful procession of violent blood acts, from fights in barrooms to horrible and massive butcheries on the plains.
The decor in the book is at war with the life forms that cut it. Nature is indifferent, foreign, and barren. Judge Holden has always touted war itself as the ultimate trade. In his mind, human beings play the part of primary interpreters. The judge said the war lasted because youthful and older men liked him in it. It becomes a nearly genuine claim that the kid bears for senseless violence.
Meridian
Regardless, the kid also desires to join the gang of Glanton scalp hunters. They spread terror and massacres across the borders of Mexico and the United States. In his lecture, Judge Holden continues to make more extensive claims indeed. In substance, war is a battle of choices, he says, and the lesser will, videlicet fate, determines the outgrowth. War is God in the judge’s expression—in the sense that it determines the course of the macrocosm.
Ironically, the book also describes a space without morality and law for the sake of testing the reader. With his position of violence from the beginning, the narrator divulges the book’s main problem; in all circles of the world, there will be savage and wild terrains to test whether the material of creation can be shaped according to human wishes or whether his own heart cannot. Near the end of the book, Judge Holden gives one answer to such a problem; if war is not a saint, then only complexion is antic.
Indeed, the position of justice demands space for unbridled wars. It is for violence that, indeed, mercy does not limit it. The strength and superiority of the new come as one of the delineations of “meridian” itself, a line in history that preliminarily matters of humans will be tried in the fires of pure war.
Epilogue: Affecting the Change
In outdoors, the literal line takes over; it is possible that hearts form clay, are burned in murder, and crack with guilt. In the end, McCarthy turns space into his place through historical yet enigmatic details. He depicts conterminous lines of actual events, similar to the consummation of the epitome that brings space into the order of places, the near-complete decimation of creatures, and the near-complete genocide of a nation.
Thus, the question arises: What happened to affect the change? McCarthy’s character turns unexpectedly as he crosses the border between the United States and Mexico. It implies a severe lack of literal knowledge on the part of the onlookers. As a nation-state, America’s service might have told many changes in the more general “state” of McCarthy’s character. Blood Meridian‘s arcane epilogue eventually deepens our understanding of “what happens to a change” while including the larger war for freedom and against space.
Not to mention, all the proper retainers of war become gods with dominion over the earth. Glanton controlled his gang, or Judge Holden controlled nearly everything he encountered, from the club stool he turned into gunpowder to the children he transgressed and killed. Throughout their passage, the scalp hunters demanded further interest in making a profit.
Prosperous of McCarthy’s World
They squander their money on debauchery. In addition, they are also more interested in dominating the lives of those around them. Everyone who failed to serve in the war truly fell from similar power. At the end of the book, it seems only the judge is fated to live ever, as shown by McCarthy dancing a war dance. Judge Holden was not so much a felonious as further of a ruffian devil that everyone knew.
He was a swindler, fabricator, and magician, as well as a killer and child bushwhacker. He was also interested in the innocence he’d to destroy. Regardless, the judge’s crimes are not simple in McCarthy’s world. McCarthy’s world is more prosperous because it has demons in it. So long as we keep our bases on the pedal, the judge is a character who is attractive, fascinating, and indeed ridiculous in all his disgusting ugliness.
When he first met the kid, he followed him with his eyes. Latterly, he claimed that he had loved the kid like a boy. The kryptonite is Ben Tobin, known as the ex-priest but a defunct novitiate. By all means, he constantly urges the kid to defy the judge. He also offered a conviction that contradicted the judge’s words.
Moral Law
The substance of the judge’s argument is that life is veritably intriguing. Even it had no meaning other than the one the humans forced into it. The moral law is the invention of humanity for the disenfranchisement of the important for the sake of the weak. The mystery is that there is no riddle. We will consider how Judge Holden presumably speaks for McCarthy himself. Tobin comes closer to presenting another side of the judge’s dialectic.
Tobin was also responsible for ordering the kid to kill the magistrate when they met him in the desert after the butchery on the Yuma ferry. Tobin tells the kid that he must do it for the love of God, do it, or he swears his life will be lost. Still, the judge said that he kept some corners of leniency for the heathen in his soul. After the kid was saved from the desert and locked in San Diego, the judge charged him with the authorities as the cause of the massacre.
According to the judge, he had failed to face the heart outside, to “face” the judge. The judge lives on, dancing in shadow and light and being a favorite. He claims he will not pass away, and the epilogue proves this.
Huckleberry Finn
The hedge will not restrain the judge nor limit the power he processes into each reader. The judge can always be faced indeed though the moral choice remains. His job is to achieve domination by being the total victor in all conflicts, genuine and patient, involving his will. His consequence is showing no mercy to others whose solicitations have driven them out of his will. As Judge Holden tells the kid at the end of the book, there is an excrescence in his heart’s fabric; he saved his soul, some corner of clemency for the heathen.
Because the kid has shown mercy to them, the judge must neither show him nor it. In the end, one serving a war god becomes not a god’s server but a god himself. Naturally, Blood Meridian is centered on what we can suppose as the brotherhood of manly goatherds. They killed the lamb entrusted to them. One of the herders is the kid who feels the spark of God within him through the call of what is his heart.
Therefore, he “awakens” slightly, attaining solicitations beyond those of the herding herdsmen who kill. Like the kid, Huckleberry Finn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer tries to save his friend from the overlord’s justice.
Nameless Man
He also opposes the destructive will of mores but is judged only by his creative mindfulness. In McCarthy’s world, the judge kills the kid in the outhouse. The kid has “awakened” but is not sufficiently developed in wisdom beyond awakening. Thus, he had no chance of survival. For similar mercy, there is another substantiation that scalp hunters cannot annihilate: the book and its readers.
Ironically, Judge Holden, who has always made an exorbitantly recorded sketch in a tally, should be just a sketch in a book that readers see from advanced governance than his own. In witnessing, the book also gives voice and life to mortal suffering that would else be lost to history. More importantly, compassion and self-assessment are nearly related to witnessing. Despite being vague, the kid is further than a fellow crown huntsman.
He was suitable to witness what was cruel in his conduct and judge them. Such a strange innocence explains his small acts of kindness. Like saving Dick Shelby’s life, the acts are little consolation besides the judge’s vision of an eternal nameless night. Nevertheless, it is only the book that offers it.
Bibliography
- Cant, J. (2013). Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. Routledge.
- Jasinski, S. M. (2011). Judge Holden and the Violence of Erasure: Blood Meridian’s Historical Skepticism. Modern Horizons, 1-10.
- McCarthy, C., & Sullivan, W. (1985). Blood Meridian (1985). Sewanee Review, 93, 652.
- Melzer, R. (1999). The Mexican War Correspondence of Richard Smith Elliott and Mr. Polk’s Army: The American Military Experience in the Mexican War and My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue.
