lacking the article itself - representation and history in cormac mccarthy’s blood meridian (moos)

The Cormac McCarthy Journal 23

Lacking the Article Itself: Representationand History in Cormac McCarthy’s BloodMeridian

Dan Moos

The task of the translator consists in finding that intendedeffect upon the language into which he is translating whichproduces in it the echo of the original.

B. Walter Benjamin

Blood Meridian is a Western, but it is a Western in which we would rather not believe. McCarthy’s nightmare world of death and destruction reflects little of what wehave come to accept as the violence of the West. In Sergio Leone’s OnceUpon a Time in the West, when Harmonica shoots down Frank, we knowthat Frank has warranted his own death. When the Virginian hangs his bestfriend—and cattle thief—Steve, we remember that all cattle rustlers mustdie, regardless as to their friendships with the righteous members of acommunity. In the traditional Western, those upon whom such justice isserved do not get scalped or sodomized, roasted or skewed. They are merelyput away, out of the picture; the righteous cleanly amputate the dishonorablefrom society. In Lonesome Dove (1985), Larry McMurtry’s romance of an1880s cattle drive published the same year as Blood Meridian, his cowboysconstantly confront death as they travel from the relative civilization ofLonesome Dove (and a borderland tamed by Texas Rangers) toward theMontana frontier: death by snakes, death from exposure, death from Indians,death by hanging. But McMurtry carefully controls the mishaps of thesecowboys in his narrative; unexpected, yet acceptable, death definesMcMurtry’s West. Jane Tompkins writes: “To go west, as far west as youcan go, west of everything, is to die”(24). After young Sean O’Brien, thefirst casualty of the trail in Lonesome Dove, is killed by snakes, Gus McCraepronounces over the grave, “Dust to dust. [. . .] Lets the rest of us go on toMontana” (307). Death is a legitimate, tolerable, and rationalized part of theWestern landscape.

Death in Blood Meridian, however, is different. McCarthy depictsdeath as neither honorable nor narratively tragic. In doing so, McCarthy’sBlood Meridian breaks the boundaries of the Western as a genre. But hedoes not challenge these limits by merely flipping Western conventions ontheir head; Blood Meridian is not an anti-Western critical or self-reflectiveof the genre. Death in McCarthy’s West is not accepted as part of some


collective job, as it is shouldered by McMurtry’s cowboys, but, rather, deathbecomes merely fate, more often than not, bathed in gore. QuotingTompkins again, “Often, death makes a sudden momentary appearance [. . .]as if to put us on notice that life is what is at stake here, and nothing less”(24). In Tompkins’s analysis death brings a heightened awareness of life.For McCarthy also, life is itself at stake in the West, but nothing more.Violence on this frontier is merely carnage, without any rejuvenating orcivilizing component; McCarthy’s characters establish nothing through theirbloodletting, except possibly the guarantee of their own destruction.

But Blood Meridian tells not only of murder and ruin, but also ofhistory and the ways that we represent history, how we make stories stand infor actions. As history is a narrative of what was, of temporal moments inthe past strung together with some narrative coherence, Blood Meridian is anovel about representation, both within its narrative and in the constructionof the novel itself. Unveiling the violence of Manifest Destiny, McCarthypresents us a kind of memory or a history we believed long masked. Heserves to us this return of the repressed, but without any displacement; wedo not need to read behind the blood to see genocide and destruction.Primarily, Blood Meridian reveals the world as we have categorized, inven-toried, and commodified it, leaving us only remnants of earthly things thatdemand a space in a nexus of exchange, whether that be goods, knowledge,or life itself. Initially, McCarthy unveils the historical repression of theviolence of Manifest Destiny and nineteenth-century (if not also twentieth)American racial superiority by cobbling together his fictional nightmarewith pieces of verifiable history. At issue, both within the novel and for thenovel itself, is precisely the nature of authenticity and its connection to the“real” world of blood and stone and light.

As a text, McCarthy builds Blood Meridian out of bits and pieces ofobscure historical data that carry little relation to the grander picture of“standard” Western progress or morality. While Larry McMurtry retainssome basic historical references in Lonesome Dove, invoking correct place-names, geography, and general historical figures and events, McCarthyfocuses on the minutia of historical verity. Blood Meridian is hyper-real.Ironically, the meticulousness of McCarthy’s research and his use of archaicbut historically appropriate language defamiliarizes much of the novel.While Lonesome Dove seems engagingly familiar to most readers becauseMcMurtry patterned his story around conventions and language that appeartransparent to an American collective frontier sensibility, McCarthy’s novelseems alien and distant in both its language and narrative. Yet, as JohnSepich in Notes on Blood Meridian and others have shown, Blood Meridianis more closely based on verifiable historical figures, events, and languagethan the seemingly more believable Lonesome Dove.


Blood Meridian, then, problematizes both literature as historicaldocumentation and history as literary text. By threading together variousand disparate accounts of filibusters and scalp hunters, McCarthy crossesthe lines that delineate these two often ideologically opposing arenas offiction and history. McCarthy creates a world where fictional and historicalcharacters (and events) share the stage without any apparent centralizing ordetermined logic. But Blood Meridian is not a historical romance centeredon a few historically derived main characters whose biographies are en-hanced through the actions and associations of minor fictional characters.Instead McCarthy weaves fiction and history: he builds certain majorfictional events in the narrative out of pieces of minor historical artifacts andstrings certain major historical events together with his fiction. McCarthypays painstaking attention to detail in the production of this novel so thatnot only are many of his characters, both those central and peripheral,historically verifiable, but many of their attributes and actions come directlyfrom historical accounts. Many of the kid’s fellow scalp hunters, the ex-priest Tobin, Marcus Webster, David Brown, and John Jackson appear inhistorical accounts of travels with the scalp hunter Glanton. The “Prussianjew named Speyer” who sells Glanton four dozen U.S. Army Colt Dragoons(BM 82), was a noted gun-runner and supplier to Mexico. The Yuma ChiefPablo, whom Glanton meets at the Yuma encampment below the ferry (BM254-55), was once seen, as McCarthy depicts him, adorned with greengoggles.1

Of the two characters who figure most prominently in the narrative,John Joel Glanton and Judge Holden, the former is a relatively well-knownand well-documented historical figure (ex-Ranger, Mexican War veteran,Indian fighter, and scalp hunter), while references to the latter seem to belimited to a single historical source. According to John Sepich, who exten-sively researched McCarthy’s sources for Blood Meridian, the only mentionof a Judge Holden in any historical document is in General SamuelChamberlain’s memoir, My Confession. John Sepich has undertaken exten-sive historical archeology in an attempt to map McCarthy’s references andhas unearthed but this single reference to any Judge Holden, though Sepichacknowledges that other larger-than-life figures from other narratives ofearly Texas and the Mexican-American War, especially John RussellBartlett’s 1856 Personal Narrative, might have provided for additional—iffuzzier—appearances of Holden in the historical record. Glanton, on theother hand, appears in numerous other sources attesting to his employmentas a scalp hunter for certain Mexican state governments and his takeover ofthe Yuma ferry on the Colorado River.2 With these two figures in particular,McCarthy weaves the distinctly historical with the predominantly fictional.

In My Confession, Chamberlain recollects his military life in


northern Mexico just after the end of the Mexican War and his followingdesertion and meeting up with Glanton’s scalp-hunting expedition.Chamberlain’s memoir is exaggerated and romantic, painting him the heroin literally every chapter. Even so, this memoir provides a significant sourcefor placing a number of McCarthy’s characters and events within a textualframework. My Confession also mirrors the temporal and geographicstructure of the narrative of Blood Meridian. Chamberlain’s memoir, likeBlood Meridian, begins in the East with his departure from home at fifteen,followed by an aimless wandering through northern Mexico, first as a U.S.Cavalryman and then as a deserter to that company. My Confession ends(rather abruptly) just a few days after Chamberlain escapes from the Yumaferry massacre on the Colorado River. Billy Carr, who furnished a deposi-tion on the Yuma ferry massacre, may have been Chamberlain under anassumed name as Chamberlain was wanted for desertion. Nonetheless, ifMcCarthy used My Confession as a main source for Blood Meridian, hebrought to Chamberlain’s account numerous other events and charactersfrom both the historical record and his imagination.

Judge Holden, the most significant character in Blood Meridianbesides the kid, appears only in the last twenty-five pages of Chamberlain’smemoir. McCarthy takes Chamberlain’s few descriptions of Holden andexpands them to create the grotesque and mythic Judge Holden of the novel.Chamberlain describes Judge Holden:

The second in command [. . .] was a man of gigantic sizecalled ‘Judge’ Holden of Texas. [. . .] He stood six feet sixin his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow facedestitute of hair and all expression. His desire was bloodand women. [. . .] Holden was by far the best educated manin northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their ownlanguage, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandangowould take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musi-cians and charm all with his wonderful performance, andout-waltz any poblano of the ball. He was ‘plum centre’with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted withthe nature of all the strange plants and their botanicalnames, great in Geology and Mineralogy, in short anotherAdmirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward. (271-72)

McCarthy’s Holden assumes all these characteristics, except cowardice; heis fat (twenty-four stone), hairless, and hawkeyed, a musician, dancer,politician, lawyer, and naturalist. Echoing Chamberlain, the ex-priest Tobin


discusses Holden with the kid:

That great hairless thing. You wouldnt think to look at himthat he could outdance the devil himself now would ye? [. ..] And fiddle. He’s the greatest fiddler I ever heard andthat’s an end on it. The greatest. He can cut a trail, shoot arifle, ride a horse, track a deer. He’s been all over the world.Him and the governor [Trias of Chihuahua] they sat up tillbreakfast and it was Paris this and London that in fivelanguages, you’d have give something to of heard them.(McCarthy 123)

Chamberlain’s Holden steps directly from the imagination of this MexicanWar veteran into McCarthy’s novel. Given the grandiose and bombastic toneof My Confession, Holden himself already enters the life of Blood Meridianas fictionalized through Chamberlain’s memories. McCarthy takes Holdenout of the self-aggrandizing tales of My Confession and cements him in hisnightmarish recreation of history.

Reading Blood Meridian and My Confession simultaneously, we seea creation of Judge Holden emerge that reflects its mirrored images in eithertext. In Blood Meridian, Holden first appears at Reverend Green’s itinerantchurch-tent in Nacogdoches: “an enormous man dressed in an oilclothslicker [. . .]. He was bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he hadno brows to his eyes nor lashes to them either. He was close to seven feet inheight and he stood smoking a cigar even in this nomadic house of God” (6).Holden publicly accuses Reverend Green of fraud, of “violating” an eleven-year-old girl in another state, and of being “run out of Fort Smith Arkansasfor having congress with a goat” (7). In Chamberlain’s narrative, Holdenappears to be guilty of at least one of these heinous crimes: “before we leftFronteras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal [sic], foullyviolated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed[Holden] as the ravisher” (271). McCarthy’s Reverend Green howls to hiscongregation, “This is him [. . .]. This is him. The devil. Here he stands” (7),possibly declaiming that Holden is indeed Beelzebub, or, quite carnally, thatHolden—and not Reverend Green—ought be indicted for the Fronterasassault. McCarthy’s Reverend Green responds to the Holden of My Confes-sion; fiction and history overlap and construct each other, with the judge atthe center. In fact, though Reverend Green remains accused of the sordidhomicide, that act attributed to Chamberlain’s Judge Holden, it isMcCarthy’s perverse syndic who later kills, if not also violates, a twelve-year-old “Mexican or halfbreed boy” left alone in an abandoned presidio(116) and a “strange dark child” spared from Glanton’s raid on the Gileños


encampment (160). The attacks made by both Holdens prefigure, of course,the kid’s fate in the outhouse behind the bar. Be he Lucifer or terrestrialmurderer, slipping out of Reverend Green’s tent during the melee followingHolden’s accusations, the kid finds “The bald man was already at the barwhen they entered” (BM 7).

The kid later recounts this incident to Tobin, who replies, “Everyman in the company claims to have encountered that sootysouled rascal insome other place” (McCarthy 124), effectively calling into question thevalidity of the kid’s story and simultaneously giving credence to a seemingomnipresence of the judge. Growing out of Chamberlain’s narrative andembellished by McCarthy, Judge Holden begins to take control of the worldof Blood Meridian, dragging all of it under his jurisdiction.

Judge Holden is a judge, though of what we do not yet know. ButHolden is also a scientist, an Enlightenment doctor of philosophy. Herepresents the ideological skeleton of a new imperialist scientific worldorder sprouting from Enlightenment rationality and the firm establishmentof capitalist principles as transcendent in American and European cultures.In fact, Rick Wallach argues that the “real” Judge Holden of Chamberlain’snarrative proclaims the “imposition of the scientific vision over the sup-planted Christian one. [. . .] [where] the new exegesis is no longer typologybut a function of the empirical eye” (“Sam Chamberlain’s Judge” 13). As hetravels with the scalp hunters, the judge collects, sketches, and catalogsnumerous natural and historical finds. Through this scientific ordering,Holden attempts to control the world around him. Collection and categoriza-tion allow him power over his surroundings through a scientific reproduc-tion of nature and history. In the judge’s thinking, representation is tanta-mount to ownership. Enlightenment ideals of science that rationalize andcompartmentalize the world drive the judge’s endless cataloging of naturalphenomena.

Judge Holden presses plants, sketches archeological finds andpetroglyphs, collects rare butterflies, shoots and stuffs birds; he can lectureon geology, ancient history, and the disappearance of the Anasazi. In 1849,the science of geology was still deeply embroiled in ideological struggleswith Christian theology; Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology was only twodecades old when the judge delivers his lectures. The judge’s knowledge ofgeology sets him apart intellectually and spiritually from the rest of histravelers. Scientific cataloging and categorization hold the ultimate power ofrepresentation, and Holden’s science accepts a one-to-one correlationbetween an article and its representation. The judge allows only his visionof the thing into his notebooks. If the object is inanimate, he must destroy it.If it is alive, he must destroy its animate qualities, its life. “The freedom ofbirds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos,” he claims (BM 199). The


judge stuffs his captured birds and packs them away among his possessions.They become mere representations of life among the many others stuffed,pressed, or sketched in the judge’s catalog.3

Within the judge’s science, the representation of an object validatesits existence; only through representation can some object be comprehendedand thus contained. But in his desire to catalog the world, the judge seeks todestroy that world. He draws potsherds, bone tools, and a sixteenth-centuryfootpiece from a suit of armor he has found in the desert. After measuringand sketching these, he commits them to the fire “much satisfied with theworld, as if his counsel had been sought at its creation” (BM 140). In theHueco Tanks, the judge wanders among the petroglyphs “copying out thosecertain ones into his book to take away with him,” and before he leaves, heobliterates one particular design (BM 173). The judge maintains control overknowledge through the destruction of original sources, thus leaving therepresentation to stand for the original, or more so, leaving the representa-tion to stand only for itself; the referent for the sketch must be merely thesketch itself, as the original is gone.4

The judge is an empiricist, believing only that which is in front ofhim and experientially verifiable. But the judge’s one-to-one correlationbetween the world of objects and the world of knowledge leads to hiserasure of history and erasure of artifacts. Objects serve no purpose oncethey have been documented; once the judge catalogs any item in his note-books, he physically destroys it. Representation must be accepted as the truearticle since only the abstraction proves the object’s original existence. Thejudge then creates his own epistemology by forcing representation to standas truth, denying existence to anything that has found its way into his books.

The judge heralds a new age of science and truth, a world based onthe data of rational, Enlightenment evaluation. But the judge’s new worlddoes not operate on the level of the original article, but in a world built uponrepresentation only. More precisely, he builds a world based on simulationas he has effectively destroyed all the originals: he builds an economy ofsigns. As the architect of this new system, Holden, now god-like, becomesprecisely the epistemological dream of Enlightenment rationalism: “suzerainof the earth” (McCarthy 198).

Jean Baudrillard’s description of the operations of signs withinpostmodernism illuminates not only the possible nonreferentiality, but alsothe power of the judge’s representative economy:

[T]he age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of allreferentials—worse: by their artificial resurrection insystems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning, inthat it lends itself to all systems of equivalence . [. . .] It is


no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, noreven of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signsof the real for the real itself, an operation to deter every realprocess by its operational double, a metastable, program-matic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all thesigns of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Neveragain will the real have to be produced. (4)

By erasing all originals, the judge invokes an economy of signs—aneconomy he generates long before the advent of Baudrillard’s vision ofpostmodernism or the late capitalism that spawned it; the judge’s worldcontains no vicissitudes to short-circuit his truth as his truth is drawn only inhis notebooks. The judge alone, by engaging this power of reproduction,becomes the sole owner of knowledge, not his own in an individualisticsense, but of a singular collected knowledge that allows him to reproducethe world and ultimately command it:

The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at hisinquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhereupon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. Inorder for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occurupon it save by my dispensation. (BM 199)

The judge has not broken any signifier-signified chain, leaving signs dan-gling in a deconstructive pose searching for meaning, but rather he cleanlycleaves the earthly object from its representation and leaves the signifier inplace as the sign itself. The judge’s dispensation is precisely the act ofdestroying the original, the autonomous object, in favor of its textualplacement within his books and kitbag.

But the world upon which the judge lays his hands is not whollyrational or verifiable. The innumerable variations and orders of the naturalworld defy the judge’s Enlightenment aspirations to find the thread thatholds this world together in some logical order. But the judge himselfaccepts that, like some epistemological Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,the creation and acquisition of knowledge and its ordering must acknowl-edge the imprint of its keeper.

Even in this world more things exist without our knowledgethan with it and the order in creation which you see is thatwhich you have put there, like a string in a maze, so thatyou will not lose your way. For existence has its own orderand that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being


but a fact among others. (BM 245)

The judge finds this order in his notebooks, in his rationally constructedeconomy of representations. Rick Wallach, in “Judge Holden, BloodMeridian’s Evil Archon,” argues that “Holden’s defense of inscription oftenreads like a satire of deconstruction” (132). But more than satire, the judge’sundertaking begins to take on a life of its own; any satirical elements in thejudge’s defense lose their power as the possible satire moves into the realmof destruction. The judge manufactures, rather than just rearranges, mean-ing. He knows that his world is merely an order of signs and that the “true”world lies evident in the referent, which Holden wishes “to expunge fromthe memory of man” (BM 140) by placing their likeness in text. The verifi-able referent’s existence blocks the completion of the judge’s granderscheme: “Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of eachlast entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he beproperly suzerain of the earth” (BM 198). The judge’s science demands theacquisition of knowledge, the textual inscription of the earth, regardless asto the means of its purchase.

To route out each last entity is the judge’s science. Placing theseobjects in his book forces them to stand naked before him. But the judgealso recognizes the problems that this kind of sign production can present.After exploring a deserted mine and returning with ore samples, the judge“[holds] an extemporary lecture in geology” with some members of thegang. A number of them quote scripture “to confound his ordering up ofeons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings” (BM 116); thejudge retorts,

Books lie, he said.God dont lie.No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words.He held up a chunk of rock.He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things. (BM 116)

For Judge Holden, the Bible is merely a false ordering of signs, and, in trueEnlightenment fashion, he undertakes to set out a new and truer system ofsigns that has its origins not in faith but in the earth itself. To destroy historyas he finds it, the judge builds a system that needs no referent, as the Bibleneeds no referent; the judge’s world, built out of the earth, will be written.

All books lie, including the judge’s, and Holden affirms this dislo-cating quality of texts. But the issue in books is not verity, but power.Holden understands the power of representation and its mutability, and byconstructing signs that carry an article beyond its physical existence, he can


manipulate information as he pleases. With a dawning awareness of thejudge’s desire to replace objects—flesh, rock, or metal—with an orderedsystem of constructed meaning, the scalp hunter Webster fears losing his lifeto the judge’s pen. He tells Holden,

Well you’ve been a draftsman somewheres andthem pictures is like enough the things themselves. [. . .]

Well said, Marcus, spoke the judge.But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in

your book.My book or some other book said the judge. What

is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. Howcould it? It would be a false book and a false book is nobook at all. (BM 140-41)

For the judge’s book truly to represent the world, it may deviate “no jotfrom the book wherein it’s writ”: the book and the world must be equiva-lents. But the judge still destroys the referent, leaving him only the residueof signification in his books. Books lie and a false book is no book at all.But the judge’s book is the world, “the stones and trees, the bones ofthings.” His book cannot lie, for there is no world to use as reference; itscircular logic of authenticity validates itself.

While Judge Holden builds his world by constructing an economyof signs, another economy of signs operates in Blood Meridian, one whosereferents, like the judge’s, are rarely verifiable. This economy, though stillsemiotic in nature, drives the characters of Blood Meridian to their horriddeeds and places them within a commerce in human life based on thecollecting of human scalps. The scalps brought in by Glanton and his gangrepresent victory in a genocidal war against the Apache and Comanche. Butmore than just symbols and proofs, the scalps operate as specie, as articlesexchanged for other articles or for different monies in officially govern-ment-sanctioned slaughter: Trias, the governor of Chihuahua, pays Glantonone hundred dollars per scalp. Human blood, or at least what passes as proofof the extinction of a human life, operates as the medium of exchange inTrias’s war. The threat of the original is gone, proven through disembodiedhair; the hair remains but a sign—a sign whose signified is precisely humanlife.5

For Glanton and his crew, scalps are specie, bloody human specie.Scalps evidence a commerce in death and, specifically, genocide as acommodity. But rules exist even in this market of genocide. Glanton’s greedeventually overcomes him: he brings to Trias numerous counterfeit scalps,leaving to the state of Chihuahua, at one hundred dollars apiece, the black


hair of the citizens he was hired to protect. Glanton’s head is soon wortheight thousand pesos on the very same market in which he originally madehis fortune.

This market in Blood Meridian is war: here Glanton and Trias tradelives. But death, the absence of human life, is defined by the presence ofscalps: as with the objects inventoried in Holden’s notebooks, the signs ofhuman life exist only through its extinction. Scalps are the medium ofexchange and human life the guarantor of the bill. Glanton’s gang knows nosuch decorum as might be found in standard shopkeeping or the haggling ofthe bazaar. They trade with firepower their own and others’ lives (andothers’ scalps if the right color) to meet their needs. But Glanton and hisbloody underlings are not merely bullies or thugs; rather the only commercethat seems rational to them is the commerce of blood. Meeting some buffalohunters bound for the markets in Mesilla, “The Americans might havetraded for some of the meat but they carried no tantamount goods and thedisposition to exchange was foreign to them” (BM 121). The Americans arenot traders, but rather mercenaries, partisans hired by the state to fight agenocidal war.

Within the logic of Blood Meridian, particularly that of the judge,all markets are merely derivative of war. Judge Holden says, “War endures.As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before manwas, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitio-ner” (BM 248). Not just a singular craft or trade, war is the primary humanoccupation as “all other trades are contained in war” (BM 249). War is themarketplace in Blood Meridian.

But within a capitalist (and a Darwinian) framework, the market-place itself may not be merely derivative of war, but truly a representationof that trade. Still, Judge Holden disdains this arena of trade as the stakes ofthe marketplace are merely second-order signs of war; shopkeeping drawsno blood. Holden holds forth:

Men are born for games. [. . .] Games of chance require awager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve theskill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation ofdefeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficientstake because they inhere in the worth of the principals anddefine them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all gamesaspire to the condition of war for here that which is wageredswallows up game, player, all. (BM 249)

The market, as a game with stakes of money or capital goods, may “aspire tothe conditions of war,” but these stakes do not swallow all, as does war.


With reference to McCarthy’s novels in general, Christine Chollier writes,“Market economies [. . .] largely bypass the main characters who findthemselves in a position where they have to resort to a lower form of marketeconomies —barter, or any other simpler mode—or where they operatethrough gifts” (47). She argues that within these “lower economies” liesocial chaos and attempts at the “complete annihilation of trade” (46),favoring violence as the only medium of exchange for life’s necessities andpleasures. Blood Meridian, for Chollier, represents a moment in McCarthy’sworks where violence becomes “reestablished as the ultimate form of trade”(46). Ultimately, though, Blood Meridian represents not a world based on“lower economies” of exchange, but rather the basal economics of genocide:trading human lives for money and land. Glanton’s gang literally harvestsscalps to sell on a market. They do not sell their labor, as a capitalisteconomy necessitates, but neither do they involve themselves in barter orgift exchange. As we have seen, “disposition to exchange was foreign tothem.” And, in fact, Glanton’s relationship to the Mexican market of geno-cide falls apart with a warrant for his own head. Even so, he continuesharvesting his hirsute goods though no more markets welcome his ex-changes.

In Leo Daugherty’s reading of Blood Meridian in “Gravers Falseand True,” the judge scorns the marketplace as a competitive arena because“he refuses to be a part of the exchange system” (165). In the kid’s fevereddream in San Diego, the judge appears overseeing a coldforger working thejudge’s likeness in coin (BM 310). But the judge constantly rejects thecoldforger’s work, a “coinage for a dawn that would not be” (McCarthy310), thus holding daylight at bay. Daugherty reads this dream as the judge’srejection of any specie-bound exchange for “all human coinage is counter-feit” (Daugherty 165). Daugherty writes that “the judge doesn’t want avictory based on any currency” (164) because the impulse for exchangefolds war into the humdrum of the marketplace. But Daugherty limitshimself to analyzing only the exchange of coins for goods. Glanton’s tradein death, driven by scalps, a commerce of signs, brings genocidal wardirectly into a market in which he exchanges his bloody goods for coins.This market, then, is the judge’s market, a market involving specie (gold andhair, counterfeit or not) where the trade practiced is war and the stakes ofexchange are human life and blood. A counterfeit coin then is merely onewithout Death’s mint; any scrip holds representative value as long as bloodseeps from its edges. Counterfeit currency, that which lies about its origins,however, may also draw blood: Glanton’s taking of Mexican scalps, coun-terfeit specie on the market within which he has agreed to operate, puts aprice on his own head by those defining the nature of the specie exchanged.Exchange in Blood Meridian is not driven by “gravers false and true”—by


authentic or counterfeit mediums. Rather, only blood defines exchange.Specie both false and true brings war and blood to the forefront of themarket, though necessarily only through signs.

The kid’s fevered dream provides him with the answer to the basequestion of the novel that the kid posed to Tobin earlier, “What’s he a judgeof?”(BM 135). The kid sees the coldforger “contriving from cold slag brutein the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residualspecie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judgeand the night does not end” (BM 310). Daugherty sees this endless night asthe refusal of Holden “to be part of the exchange system” (165). Holdenremains the judge of any attempt to pass his likeness into that nexus; thusthe night has no end. But rather than the judge withholding his approval as aguarantor of the specie, the judge must, given his long-standing project tosubdue the earthly world through sign production, be the sole judge of anyrepresentative value. He alone decides what items may stand in for them-selves and which ones must have stand-ins for their intrinsic value. Holdendecides when the spared Gileño boy may be an Apache and when he willtransform into a scalp. Holden may fear that war will lose its efficacy to themarketplace, but ultimately the trading of signs fuels war. The marketplace,especially with reference to Glanton’s collected scalps, remains not deriva-tive of war, as Daugherty reads, but precisely war itself. The market ofBlood Meridian, not unlike the market of global capitalism (if not allcapitalism), has become slick with blood of the world’s referents, a geno-cidal pit with sweaty brokers fighting for the value of ephemeral bills whoseguarantees are no longer material, if even alive.

Within Blood Meridian, the natural world has a transcendent, yetunknowable, order: “existence has its own order and that no man’s mind cancompass, that mind itself being but a fact among others” (BM 245). TheCrossing (1994) echoes this same idea. Dianne Luce argues that, like JudgeHolden’s semiotic rendering of the world, “the human capability for narra-tive [. . .] is our primary means of accessing and perhaps communicating thething itself” (208). But for Luce, “the thing itself” to which McCarthyyearns to reach in his prose “carries connotations of truth, ultimate essence,the sacred heart of things [. . .] and [McCarthy] implies that humans accessthe thing itself only by transcending the obstacles posed by artifact, lan-guage, and physical sense” (208-09). But in Blood Meridian the thing itselfdisappears, crumpled in the fire or into dust. To transcend the obstacles is tofind bits of carbon or scratched chert or, more likely, rotting bodies.

Judge Holden knows that power comes through one’s ability tomake an order “like a string in a maze” that regulates information. Thejudge becomes the master of a discourse whose truth lies in the “stones andtrees, the bones of things,” but which once tabernacled in a text becomes


transcendent in itself. Just as the market in scalps brings money to thepartisans, the judge’s economics of rationalization and representation bringhim power over the narrative of human society.

As the judge builds a world of signs from the obliterated naturalworld, McCarthy threads a narrative from few and fragmented historicaldocuments concerning Glanton and his travels. The history of Blood Merid-ian is hyper-specific, given little to the broader historical gestures of otherWestern writers such as McMurtry. In McCarthy’s stylization, Blood Merid-ian seems alien and distant in a genre based on familiarity and a collectiveunconscious about the West. Tompkins writes, “Half the pleasure of West-erns comes from this sense of familiarity, spliced with danger” (25). ButMcCarthy’s fiction refuses any kind of familiarity. McCarthy’s bad guys arenot merely black-hatted cowards who rustle cattle or shoot their opponentsin the back. Instead they slaughter and mutilate innocent people. InMcCarthy’s West, there are no white hats and no redemption. The carnageof the text and the various permutations of representations, both within thenovel and the novel itself, effectively destroy any sense of acceptable orderin the popular memory of a mythic frontier West.

McCarthy moves beyond writing revisionist history. While histori-ans such as Patricia Nelson Limerick expose Western expansion as a“Legacy of Conquest,” McCarthy uncovers the butchery of those rational-ized imperialisms. Linking Blood Meridian to Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunchmight provide fruitful for comparisons of revisionary impulses withinWesterns, but mainly only in terms of artistic style and possibly as state-ments about the visual culture of America post-Vietnam.6 More importantly,though, we can read McCarthy’s narrative as a statement on the dangers ofmisrepresentation. Like the judge, we build histories that subscribe to ourfuture desires. We dismiss the details of historical violence or blame atroci-ties on maniacal or ostracized individuals (Captain White, who, of course,ends up pickled). Robert L. Jarrett claims that McCarthy’s novel is “anattempt at a dramatic and ritualized experience of American history as it waslived. [. . .] and may more successfully express the bloody tragedy ofWestern history than any historian” (92-93).7 By following the judge’simpulse to build a world of his own definition, we as readers becomeshocked when McCarthy’s act of unveiling “the thing itself” jars us fromour own notebooks, kitbags, or portmanteaus. The scales hopefully fall fromour eyes as we read Blood Meridian as “a catastrophic act of witness,embracing the real by tracing it in gore” (Shaviro 153).

Ultimately, Blood Meridian is about exchange value andcommodification under both nineteenth-century imperialism and twentieth-century late capitalism—our own official histories also available on someintellectual market. The distinctions between that market and an arena of


war have grown fuzzy and indistinct. Dragging everything—goods, lives,ideals, history, knowledge, and body parts—into markets fueled by Ameri-can expansionist politics, Judge Holden bluntly tells Toadvine, as well as us,“Everything’s for sale” (BM 282).

NOTES

1. See John Sepich’s Notes on Blood Meridian. Though he sometimesstretches the possibilities of connections, his work is invaluable for readingBlood Meridian in any historical light. The references to the kid’s fellowscalp hunters are numerous here; see especially William Carr’s depositionon the Yuma ferry massacre, 132-35; (on Webster in particular, see alsoSmith 48, 56); on Speyer see Sepich 42-43; on Chief Pablo, see Sepich 54.

2. See Sepich, especially 27-42. Chamberlain rode with Glanton’s gang afterhis desertion and was present at the Yuma ferry takeover and subsequentmassacre; see Chamberlain 267-97.

3. The vehicle that literally holds the judge’s world is his portmanteau. Itholds both his sketches and his birds, and he seems never to be without it.Upon first sighting of the judge, he has with him only a coat, his gun, and a“canvas kitbag.” Walking through the desert after the ferry massacre, almostnude and “bedraped with meat” he carries only a “small canvas satchel”(BM 282).

4. For an extensive discussion of the judge’s ability to create and control hisworld through the act of naming, see Joshua J. Masters, “‘Witness to theUttermost Edge of the World’: Judge Holden’s Textual Enterprise in CormacMcCarthy’s Blood Meridian.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction40.1 (Fall 1998): 25-37.

5. According to Smith, Chihuahua paid 17,896 pesos out of its treasury forpayment for scalps in 1849 (56). The prices paid to bounty hunters inChihuahua as of May 25, 1849 were: male warrior, 200 pesos with evidenceof death (scalps), 250 pesos if alive; women or children under fourteen, 150pesos if alive. In Durango after July 5, 1849, “The government is empow-ered to contract with national or foreign partisans who organize to fight thebarbarous Indians that invade the state and to pay them a remuneration of200 pesos for each Indian whom they kill or apprehend.” See Smith 44-47and his notes 7 and 10.

6. See Barcley Owens, Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels, (Tucson:


University of Arizona Press), 2000. Owens argues that images from Viet-nam, particularly the visual unveiling of the massacres at My Lai in 1969,allow for the presentation of Blood Meridian’s violence. But more so,Vietnam brought violence to the forefront of the American imagination sothat citizens might begin critiques of representation. Vietnam was a “thing initself.” McCarthy’s novel reflects that thing back into the American past.See also Brady Harrison’s “‘That immense and bloodslaked waste’: Nega-tion in Blood Meridian.” Southwestern American Literature 25.1 (Fall1999): 35-42, for his analysis of the echoes of Vietnam in Blood Meridian.He writes, “McCarthy implies that, a century after the atrocities of westwardexpansion [. . .] Americans have not learned from history, have held onto,without critical reflection, the vicious tradition of negation” (40).

7. In addition to Jarrett’s claims, Rick Wallach argues that Holden representsthe rupture of historical repression. Out of the political and psychologicalgerrymandering of our past, Holden rises to confront us “in his daemonicwhiteness” (“Judge Holden” 138).

WORKS CITED

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.Chamberlain, Samuel E. My Confession. New York: Harper and Brothers,

1956.Chollier, Christine. “‘I ain’t come back rich, that’s for sure’ or The Ques-

tioning of Market Economies in Cormac McCarthy’s Novels.”Southwestern American Literature 25:1 (Fall 1999): 43-49.

Daugherty, Leo. “Gravers True and False: Blood Meridian as GnosticTragedy.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnoldand Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 157-72.

Harrison, Brady. “‘That immense and bloodslaked waste’: Negation inBlood Meridian.” Southwestern American Literature 25.1 (Fall1999): 35-42.

Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997.Luce, Dianne C. “The Road and the Matrix: The World as Tale in The

Crossing.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnoldand Dianne C. Luce. Rev. ed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999.195-219.

Masters, Joshua J. “ A Witness to the Uttermost Edge of the World”: JudgeHolden’s Textual Enterprise in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Merid-ian.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 40:1 (Fall 1998):25-37.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, Or, The Evening Redness in the West.


New York: Ecco Press, 1985.McMurtry, Larry. Lonesome Dove. New York: Pocket Books, 1985.Owens, Barcley. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. Tucson: U of Arizona

P, 2000.Sepich, John. Notes on Blood Meridian. Louisville: Bellarmine College

Press, 1993.Shaviro, Steven. “‘The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of Blood

Meridian.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Edwin T.Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 143-56.

Smith, Ralph A. “Scalp Hunting: A Mexican Experiment in Warfare.” GreatPlains Journal 23 (1984): 41-81.

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York:Oxford UP, 1992.

Wallach, Rick. “Judge Holden, Blood Meridian’s Evil Archon.” SacredViolence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. WadeHall and Rick Wallach. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995. 125-36.

_____. “Sam Chamberlain’s Judge Holden and the Iconography of Sciencein Mid-19th Century Nation-Building.” Southwestern AmericanLiterature 23.1 (Fall 1997): 9-17.

lacking the article itself - representation and history in cormac mccarthy’s blood meridian (moos)

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