Episode IV: The Meaning of Judge Holden

1. What’s He a Judge Of?

In Chapter X of Blood Meridian, Ben Tobin tells the Kid that the first time he met Judge Holden, Glanton’s Gang was out of gunpowder and being pursued by Apaches. Tobin says that the Judge:

“Saved us all. I have to give him that. We come down off the Little Colorado we didn’t have a pound of powder in the company. Pound. We’d not a dram hardly. There [the Judge] sat on a rock in the middle of the greatest desert you’d ever want to see. Just perched on this rock like a man waiting for a coach […] in that wilderness by his single self. Aye and there was no rock, just the one. Irving said he’d brung it with him.” (130-31)

For over ten pages, the Kid listens without comment or question to Tobin’s wondrous tale, how the Judge managed to synthesize gunpowder out of wood charcoal, guano, sulfur and urine, allowing the gang to turn the tables on their Apache pursuers. When Tobin’s finished, the Kid has only one question: “What’s he a judge of?”

But Tobin is wary of the Judge who happens to be seated just across the fire and he warns the Kid instead of answering him: “Ah, lad. Hush now. He’ll hear you. He’s ears like a fox.” (141)

But the question stands and has likely been asked by many readers of McCarthy’s masterpiece. In a novel filled with mystery, the Kid’s question is one that the novel ends up answering unambiguously.

2. To Expunge Them From the Memory of Man

Throughout his journey with Glanton and the scalphunters, the Kid watches Judge Holden collect artifacts and draw them in the sketchbook he carries. Readers first witness to this behavior in Chapter XI:

“The Judge all day had made small forays among the rocks of the gorge through which they’d passed and now at the fire he spread part of a wagonsheet on the ground and was sorting out his finds and arranging them before him. In his lap he held the leather ledgerbook and he took up each piece, flint or potsherd or tool of bone, and deftly sketched it into the book. He sketched with a practiced ease and there was no wrinkling of that bald brow or pursing of those oddly childish lips. His fingers traced the impression of old willow wicker on a piece of pottery clay and he put this into his book with nice shadings, an economy of pencil strokes. He is a draftsman as he is other things, well sufficient to the task. He looks up from time to time at the fire or his companions in arms or at the night beyond. Lastly he set before him the footpiece from a suit of armor hammered out in a shop in Toledo three centuries before, a small steel tapadero frail and shelled with rot. This the Judge sketched in profile and in perspective, citing the dimensions in his neat script, making marginal notes.” (146)

An interesting pastime for a serial murderer and pederast, but there is another component to this hobby:

“When he had done he took up the little footguard and turned it in his hand and studied it again and then he crushed it into a ball of foil and pitched it into the fire. He gathered up the other artifacts and cast them also into the fire and he shook out the wagonsheet and folded it away among his possibles together with the notebook. Then he sat with his hands cupped in his lap and he seemed much satisfied with the world, as if his counsel had been sought at its creation.” (146)

What exactly is the Judge up to here? It’s a question that other members of Glanton’s gang have as well:

“A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the Judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the Judge smiled and said it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man.” (147)

Webster assumes the Judge is joking. He says, “No man can put all the world in a book. No more than everthing drawed [sic] in a book is so.”

“Well said, Marcus,” is the Judge’s reply.

This scene reverberates through the second half of the book and, while there is much to unpack in the passage, its narrative purpose is clear and its thematic significance already dawning on the perceptive reader: the Judge draws representations of the relics he discovers and then destroys the originals. In doing so, his pictorial re-presentations remain the only record of his various “finds.”

This isn’t the only passage in the novel where we see the Judge makes sketches and then erase his subject. In Chapter XIII, when the Gang is camped at the Hueco tanks, the scalphunters encounter a plethora of “ancient paintings” in the rocks, and “the Judge was soon among them copying out certain ones into his book to take away with him. They were of men and animals and of the chase and there were curious birds and arcane maps and there were constructions of such singular vision as to justify every fear of man and the things that are in him. Of these etchings—some bright yet with color—there were hundreds, and yet the Judge went among them with assurance, tracing out the very ones which he required. When he had done and while there was yet light he returned to a certain stone ledge and sat a while and studied again the work there. Then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scrappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it, only a raw place in the stone where it had been. Then he put up his book and returned to camp.” (180)

In Chapter XIV, Toadvine watches the Judge working with his ledger and asks him about “his purpose in all of this.” (206)

After he has finished writing, the Judge puts away the book, looks at Toadvine and says, “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.” (207)

Toadvine—and likely the reader—wants to know what a suzerain is. The Judge answers: “A keeper or overlord,” then adds, “a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers.” (207)

The Judge, it seems, must make copies of the artifacts he discovers and it might be good to remember precisely what an artifact is: “a handmade object, as a tool, or the remains of one, as a shard of pottery, characteristic of an earlier time or cultural stage.”

It’s especially interesting to witness the Judge destroy the representations he happens upon: the cave painting for example. The Judge makes his own (re)presentations of various objects, then wipes out the original, expunging it from the memory of man.

The only record that will remain is the only the Judge leaves.

3. What He’s a Judge Of

After the destruction of Glanton’s Gang at the Yuma Ferry in Chapter XIX and the Kid’s escape from Judge Holden in Chapter XXI, our protagonist washes up drunk at a doctor’s office in San Diego with an arrow head in his leg.

The doctor gives him ether before the surgery and the Kid falls into a troubling dream:

“In that sleep and sleeps to come the Judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. […] In his delirium, [the Kid] ransacked the linens of his pallet for arms, but there were none. The Judge smiled. The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The Judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger [counterfeiter] who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men’s fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins [tools of the counterfeiter] who seeks favor with the Judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that would pass, an image that would render this residual specie [coin] current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the Judge judge and the night does not end.” (322-23)

Currency derives its name from its condition as legal tender: coins or notes are “current” if they have been approved by a government for the discharge of debts. Business are required by US law to accept all currency: that’s what legal tender means.

Counterfeit money offers a very interesting problem. Since all money is a necessary fiction—a society agrees that pieces of metal or paper have value so its citizens don’t have to walk around with pigs under their arms to trade for flour—counterfeit money (some of which is very skillfully made) calls everything into question, reminding folks the money is fictional. It also devalues the coins and notes our government has sanctioned.

A counterfeit is a skillful representation or copy. It is, in fact, a copy of a copy, since “real” coins are themselves representational: their faces often bear portraits of Presidents or “Liberty” or eagles and other national symbology.

The coldforger/counterfeiter from the Kid’s fever dream is trying to create a fake coin that can “pass” as actual currency, that can be “rendered current.” If he accomplishes this, he’s upended the whole symbol system of Money itself, creating a fiction that takes the place of the real—just as the Judge does with his various sketches, creating convincing portraits then destroying the originals.

In the dream, the Judge “enshadows” this Counterfeiter as the man hammers away, trying to create a fake that can take the place of the genuine article. The narrator tells us that this—this process of counterfeiting—is what the Judge is a judge of: the entire process by which counterfeits replace authentic objects.

The Judge, then, is a judge of representation.

And isn’t McCarthy himself like the Counterfeiter? A writer who creates a fiction about the American Southwest in the mid-19th century, a representation that is so vivid many of us take it as accurately depicting the experience of Americans in this time and place. How many of you will read an academic (or even popular) history of the American Southwest?

Very few.

But you’ve read McCarthy’s counterfeit which passes as being in some way historically accurate in your imagination—or, at the very least, convincing.

Note that, in my reading of the above passage, McCarthy is not the Judge: McCarthy is the artisan “enshadowed” by the Judge, in some ways enslaved to him, “hammering out like his own conjectural destiny some coin for a dawn that would not be.”

All his life, McCarthy has sought favor with this Judge, a entity—like the Muse, almost—who can evaluate whether or not the representations McCarthy’s made can pass muster, whether they will be “rendered current in the markets where men barter.”

Cormac is 89 today. He’s had two novels published in the pass 90 days.

He still seeks favor with the Judge of Representation.

And the night does not end.