From: s1mbm@isuvax.iastate.edu (michael bruce mcdonald)
Subject: Roger Squires on *Blood Meridian*
Reply-To: s1mbm@isuvax.iastate.edu
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 22:29:38 GMT

Roger, thank you for that perceptive commentary on *BM*.

I have trouble seeing the judge as an incarnation of evil, partly because
I don't particularly believe in the concept of pure evil, and partly
because the judge's inner motivation remains unclear to me.  I would tend
to see Glanton as the figure of evil here, at least of an evil conceived
along the lines of "ignorance of one's true nature" (the Buddhist, rather
than Christian notion of evil).  Glanton seems to have no inner life, and
thus it makes sense to me that--lacking knowledge of the intimations of
immortality that only an inner life can provide--he is in a sense possessed
by the externalized life of violence which, as you say, practically inhabits
the very landscape portrayed by McCarthy.

I have a problem with this very point, as well.  Given everything that we've
learned about the extraordinary beauty and delicacy of this landscape since
the 19th century, is McCarthy being deliberately anachronistic in suppressing
such aspects of the landscape, or is he rather revealing a rather harsh
weltanschaung here?  After all, his style is not so much anachronistic as
innovatively revisionist, so it would be hard for me to credit the notion
that his landscape is so unrelievedly bleak because it *must* be for purposes
of verisimilitude.  I am not saying that the landscape he depicts is not in
fact a harsh one; just that it is so much more than harsh, and McCarthy chooses
to omit, for the most part, this remainder of beauty.

As for the judge, I wonder if the most revealing moment isn't that in which we
learn that his purpose for drawing the plants and animals the ragged company
encounters on their way--far from having to do with aesthetic or even
conventionally scientific motivations--has to do with his need to give--or to
withdraw--his permission for their very existence.  This is a nice, zany
moment in the book, and yet makes the judge seem so silly that it contradicts
the constant assertions of the judge's uncanny *practical* wisdom.  As I read
this passage, I began to wonder if McCarthy aims to produce a sort of 
North American magic realism; the judge giving his permission to creatures that
exist just fine without him to exist strikes me as an attempt to do something
that Garcia Marquez could better do by making the judge *generally* hazier
than he appears here.  That is, it seems to me that the judge is too definitely
characterized as deadly practical throughout the novel to allow this moment to
be a revelatory one; instead, it ultimately just muddies the waters, as does
the judge's final, hopelessly inflated, grand speech:  "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" (331).  This is so inflated that I tend to think
that it reveals that McCarthy is almost ridiculing the reader for taking
any aspect of the book seriously, finally.  If his desire was to create a
self-mocking postmodern narrative, I just wish he had tipped us off to that
design a bit earlier!

thanks again,
michael mcdonald