Depending on who you ask, The Judge could be the antichrist, the ubermensch, the physical manifestation of human evil, or an archon servant of the demiurge. There just isn't a universal consensus on what Blood Meridian is about. Personally, though, the most compelling reading of The Judge is that he represents the human tendency to intellectualize and control. When we, as human beings, speak about the world, we partition it arbitrarily. We take the noumenal and divide it into distinct regions, when, yes, there is unironically a universal oneness in creation. An apple tree is not necessarily distinct from an apple, and both the apple and the apple tree are not necessarily distinct from the earth, or the air around it, since the apple tree needed nutrients from the earth and the air to grow the apple. They are intrinsically inseparable parts of a whole, but yet through language, we say that they're separate implicity. >"Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way."
The Judge represents the human tendency to describe the world through the arbitrary cladistics of language. It's why he's a scientist and a lawyer, as both are professions that attempt to shunt linguistic models onto reality. As The Judge tells Toadvine, he aims to become the "suzerain of the earth" and control it, allowing nothing to be "autonomous", mirroring the human tendency to be fearful of the unknown, and to want to subjugate it with logic and language.
>"The judge arched his brow. Did you post witnesses? he said. To report to you on the continuing existence of those places once you'd quit them"
McCarthy offers this human tendency that The Judge represents as the cause of evil and violence in the world. I'm going to start to sound like a liberal universalist English teacher so you'll have to bear with me. The use of language to describe the world allows us to describe foreign people-groups as inferiors and subhumans, giving us grounds on which to murder and exterminate them. This has been going on throughout history, with the violence on the western frontier, the "blood meridian", only being the latest iteration of this primordial cycle of violence and subjugation. >"He wore a round hat with a narrow brim and he was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and drifter and drunkard and thief and he was among the dregs of the earth in beggary a thousand years and he was among the scapegrace scions of eastern dynasties and in all that motley assemblage he sat by them and yet alone as if he were some other sort of man entire and he seemed little changed or none in all these years"
It's why the Judge is up-to-date on eugenics, >"He adduced for their consideration references to the children of Ham, the lost tribes of Israelites, certain passages from the Greek poets, anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assessment of racial traits with respect to climatic and geographical influences."
It's also why there's all those weird scenes of the Glanton gang "continuing autonomous without reference to sun or man or God" and stuff. They're the latest iteration of the primordial cycle.
The judge himself admits the impossibility of subjugating everything that is autonomous, as much as he exhorts the rest of the Glanton gang to. As he himself says, >"For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
The judge's path is impossible. The world is too chaotic and inherently disordered to allow humans to know the world and become the "suzerains of the earth." The judge seems to know this, and perhaps even knows the consequences of the ideology he espouses, but doesn't care. This is what he monologues in the Anasazi Ruins, >"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."
tl;dr (I know, I know, "r-REDDIT!" Shut up Black person) The Judge is the human capacity to classify and control.
>For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others
Very Hegelian. This is also the basis of the 'third destiny' that The Judge talks about.
I posted the Nietzschean interpretation in the other thread and this was really good, thanks. Explains why people call him a Gnostic instead of a Nietzschean. But I don't think our takes are incompatible, because even if everything you said is true McCarthy still seems to agree with Nietzsche's pessimistic (by normal standards) view of human psychology. He doesn't know if we'll ever overcome that kind of brutal tribalism, and thinks if we do the most likely alternative is worse.
8 months ago
Anonymous
>Nietzschean
What do you think about this essay?
http://blogmeridian.com/hello-world/
Delves deeper than just the moral framework of both writers.
8 months ago
Anonymous
mccarthy has elements of nietzschean philosophy but i wouldnt call him a nietzschean, like you said
>Personally, though, the most compelling reading of The Judge is that he represents the human tendency to intellectualize and control. When we, as human beings, speak about the world, we partition it arbitrarily. We take the noumenal and divide it into distinct regions, when, yes, there is unironically a universal oneness in creation. An apple tree is not necessarily distinct from an apple, and both the apple and the apple tree are not necessarily distinct from the earth, or the air around it, since the apple tree needed nutrients from the earth and the air to grow the apple. They are intrinsically inseparable parts of a whole, but yet through language, we say that they're separate implicity.
Yeah that's the basis of McCarthy's philosophy. You would enjoy The Crossing. It centers this statement in its narrative arguably even more than Blood meridian.
He's a Humbert or Pooter type character, whom the reader is supposed to see through, though of course the gang (and by proxy white America) do not. Tyler Durden for litbros
Nabokov: >writes e-girlta, which is of course 100% straightforwardly about how pedophilia is bad and we should see through the evil protagonist >writes Speak, Memory, a memoir fixated on his idyllic childhood in Russia, which takes the perspective that childhood is the most real and vivid part of human experience and life after that gradually becomes greyed-out and fast-forwarded. Includes, in this autobiography, several lascivious descriptions of 10-year-old girls he was in love with as a child, while reducing his actual wife to barely a footnote. >writes Ada or Ardour, a book about a brilliant author who has a lifelong sexual relationship with his sister. A huge chunk of the book is taken up by their first summer together as little kids, and is full of passionate, pornographic child sex scenes. The siblings are separated, but the protagonist keeps himself going by fricking child prostitutes. When they're finally reunited in old age, he maintains his attraction to her by imagining her as a pre-pubuscent girl
I really am curious what the response is to this. What's the innocent explanation? Talking about e-girlta without reference to Ada or Speak, Memory feels like ignoring the elephant in the room.
The Judge is nature itself. Despite the name, he never really judges people or animals based on their merits, he's just capriciously evil, e.g. hurling the puppies into the river or raping and murdering all of those kids.He's a spirit of the West itself, given to wanton, pointless, inexplicable violence. McCarthy's point with his character is that moral people should reject his naturalistic doctrine in favour of more human codes of morality, but that itinerant mercenaries like the Glanton gang often lose touch of these codes, leading them in to the brutality that the Judge says is inevitable.
jesus christ shut the frick up
please, no more
>bumps thread to beg for no more
Father Holguin said something similar
when talking about what, Abel did.
-
The Judge is Lawful Evil, while Glanton is Chaotic Evil
The Judge is white men
Darth Vader
Anubis is Darth Vader? The more you know.
Depending on who you ask, The Judge could be the antichrist, the ubermensch, the physical manifestation of human evil, or an archon servant of the demiurge. There just isn't a universal consensus on what Blood Meridian is about. Personally, though, the most compelling reading of The Judge is that he represents the human tendency to intellectualize and control. When we, as human beings, speak about the world, we partition it arbitrarily. We take the noumenal and divide it into distinct regions, when, yes, there is unironically a universal oneness in creation. An apple tree is not necessarily distinct from an apple, and both the apple and the apple tree are not necessarily distinct from the earth, or the air around it, since the apple tree needed nutrients from the earth and the air to grow the apple. They are intrinsically inseparable parts of a whole, but yet through language, we say that they're separate implicity.
>"Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way."
The Judge represents the human tendency to describe the world through the arbitrary cladistics of language. It's why he's a scientist and a lawyer, as both are professions that attempt to shunt linguistic models onto reality. As The Judge tells Toadvine, he aims to become the "suzerain of the earth" and control it, allowing nothing to be "autonomous", mirroring the human tendency to be fearful of the unknown, and to want to subjugate it with logic and language.
>"The judge arched his brow. Did you post witnesses? he said. To report to you on the continuing existence of those places once you'd quit them"
McCarthy offers this human tendency that The Judge represents as the cause of evil and violence in the world. I'm going to start to sound like a liberal universalist English teacher so you'll have to bear with me. The use of language to describe the world allows us to describe foreign people-groups as inferiors and subhumans, giving us grounds on which to murder and exterminate them. This has been going on throughout history, with the violence on the western frontier, the "blood meridian", only being the latest iteration of this primordial cycle of violence and subjugation.
>"He wore a round hat with a narrow brim and he was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and drifter and drunkard and thief and he was among the dregs of the earth in beggary a thousand years and he was among the scapegrace scions of eastern dynasties and in all that motley assemblage he sat by them and yet alone as if he were some other sort of man entire and he seemed little changed or none in all these years"
It's why the Judge is up-to-date on eugenics,
>"He adduced for their consideration references to the children of Ham, the lost tribes of Israelites, certain passages from the Greek poets, anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assessment of racial traits with respect to climatic and geographical influences."
It's also why there's all those weird scenes of the Glanton gang "continuing autonomous without reference to sun or man or God" and stuff. They're the latest iteration of the primordial cycle.
The judge himself admits the impossibility of subjugating everything that is autonomous, as much as he exhorts the rest of the Glanton gang to. As he himself says,
>"For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
The judge's path is impossible. The world is too chaotic and inherently disordered to allow humans to know the world and become the "suzerains of the earth." The judge seems to know this, and perhaps even knows the consequences of the ideology he espouses, but doesn't care. This is what he monologues in the Anasazi Ruins,
>"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."
tl;dr (I know, I know, "r-REDDIT!" Shut up Black person) The Judge is the human capacity to classify and control.
>For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others
Very Hegelian. This is also the basis of the 'third destiny' that The Judge talks about.
I posted the Nietzschean interpretation in the other thread and this was really good, thanks. Explains why people call him a Gnostic instead of a Nietzschean. But I don't think our takes are incompatible, because even if everything you said is true McCarthy still seems to agree with Nietzsche's pessimistic (by normal standards) view of human psychology. He doesn't know if we'll ever overcome that kind of brutal tribalism, and thinks if we do the most likely alternative is worse.
>Nietzschean
What do you think about this essay?
http://blogmeridian.com/hello-world/
Delves deeper than just the moral framework of both writers.
mccarthy has elements of nietzschean philosophy but i wouldnt call him a nietzschean, like you said
>Personally, though, the most compelling reading of The Judge is that he represents the human tendency to intellectualize and control. When we, as human beings, speak about the world, we partition it arbitrarily. We take the noumenal and divide it into distinct regions, when, yes, there is unironically a universal oneness in creation. An apple tree is not necessarily distinct from an apple, and both the apple and the apple tree are not necessarily distinct from the earth, or the air around it, since the apple tree needed nutrients from the earth and the air to grow the apple. They are intrinsically inseparable parts of a whole, but yet through language, we say that they're separate implicity.
Yeah that's the basis of McCarthy's philosophy. You would enjoy The Crossing. It centers this statement in its narrative arguably even more than Blood meridian.
>read first sentence
>immediately identify a pseud
>no actual counter argument
He's a judge
gray alien
He's a Humbert or Pooter type character, whom the reader is supposed to see through, though of course the gang (and by proxy white America) do not. Tyler Durden for litbros
Nabokov:
>writes e-girlta, which is of course 100% straightforwardly about how pedophilia is bad and we should see through the evil protagonist
>writes Speak, Memory, a memoir fixated on his idyllic childhood in Russia, which takes the perspective that childhood is the most real and vivid part of human experience and life after that gradually becomes greyed-out and fast-forwarded. Includes, in this autobiography, several lascivious descriptions of 10-year-old girls he was in love with as a child, while reducing his actual wife to barely a footnote.
>writes Ada or Ardour, a book about a brilliant author who has a lifelong sexual relationship with his sister. A huge chunk of the book is taken up by their first summer together as little kids, and is full of passionate, pornographic child sex scenes. The siblings are separated, but the protagonist keeps himself going by fricking child prostitutes. When they're finally reunited in old age, he maintains his attraction to her by imagining her as a pre-pubuscent girl
I really am curious what the response is to this. What's the innocent explanation? Talking about e-girlta without reference to Ada or Speak, Memory feels like ignoring the elephant in the room.
He's an anime villain.
The Judge is nature itself. Despite the name, he never really judges people or animals based on their merits, he's just capriciously evil, e.g. hurling the puppies into the river or raping and murdering all of those kids.He's a spirit of the West itself, given to wanton, pointless, inexplicable violence. McCarthy's point with his character is that moral people should reject his naturalistic doctrine in favour of more human codes of morality, but that itinerant mercenaries like the Glanton gang often lose touch of these codes, leading them in to the brutality that the Judge says is inevitable.