/lit/ - Literature

Was he a human, or something more? Is there a more evil character in fiction than the Judge?

ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

Books about Big Guys?

My take is this:

Holden saw in the Kid a spark of goodness, something inside that sough to staunch the violence that was so common and which The Judge saw as an principal of mankind and which was the highest form of divination - as he put it - putting the strong above the weak.

You'll remember that Holden also says that birds are an insult to him and that he'd have them all in zoo's. I feel Holden, given his self-assured ideas of how mankind is and ought to be, saw the freedom and nature of birds, chaotic, free, above all other beats -Literally- as similar to that of the Kid; he was yet to be tamed and attuned to complete barbarity as the others, that there was goodness in him.

The Judge would have seen this himself when The Kid refused to kill the Judge at the well, how the Kid takes a back seat and in barely mentioned in some of the most violent parts of the book, his mellowness a few years after the Glanton gang were disbanded, his 'innocent eyes' upon an 'untouched face'.

Holden, having influenced all the men of the gang and having touched the lives of them all, is snubbed by the Kid, now the Man, who survives, mellows out and even comforts a lonely dying woman that he feels he cannot leave to die in the cold of the desert - of course she was a corpse, he just didn't know it but the point is that he was showing compassion.

What happened in the Jakes then ties in with Holden finding the Man, all those years later. Holden has not aged and is still in a milieu of bad men and bad places, and Holden laments in a way how The Kid 'Held clemency for the Heathen, the heathen being the good natured and people who do not ascribe to Holden's law of pure violent, Survival of the Fittest outlook in life.

It becomes apparent then that Holden has found The Man after all these years and in this moment, a baby bear, an innocent animal that will grow in to a beast, is killed - synonymous with Holden's hatred and penchant for destroying innocence i.e, he rapes and murders children - and a young girl goes missing as well. Again, the tarnishing of innocence. Children are free and above all others, like birds - an insult to Holden.

The Man soon after cannot get it up when he hires a prostitute, so he heads back to the Jakes where the Judge consumes him.

What happened: The Man could not outrun the Judge and his influence, who was a phantom over the lives of all the men he touched and who he drove to evil and wretchedness. The Man raped and murdered the young girl while Holden watched, and in such a way that he made up for those years where he never gave in to Holden, he made up for lost time and as such, it was such a horrific sight to lay eyes on that it shocked even the people of that violent and horrible world and that man who tells the others not to go in to the jakes? That was The Man, now another faceless, nameless shade of that violent world, casually taking a post-coital piss as one does after sex.

Blood Meridian to be quite honest.

I'd read the Road and No Country before and liked them. Then hearing about some of the wild shit in the book hooked me.

Spent a whole summers day under a gazebo drinking Rum and reading it. Was a nice, comfy day though the book did make me feel weird as well due to the nature of some of the things in it. A mixture of hopelessness and relief.

I seldom read fiction any way so it was a nice break.

>Holy...I want war

What was his endgame/fucking problem?

>tfw no judge bf

Why the fuck was the judge content with following the orders of some self-interested killer like Glanton?

What did Glanton even bring to the table, other than supplying weapons and being a good shot?

ye

>"See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches by the fire and watches him."

So he kills the kid at the end, right?

I keep seeing him in my dreams, /lit.

You said it was just Meme literature

What the fuck was his problem?

>>8197685
Two nu males I know couldn't get past the first forty pages. I read it in three sittings.

We all took an interest in the book but only they gave up.

I keep seeing him in my Nightmares, /lit/.

>tfw no judge bf

What was his fucking problem?

The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the sword, said the black.

The judge smiled.

What right man would have it any other way? he said.

The good book does indeed count war an evil, said Irving. Yet there’s many a bloody tale of war inside it.

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

He turned to Brown, from whom he’d heard some whispered slur or demurrer. Ah Davy, he said. It’s your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge each.

My trade?

Certainly.

What is my trade?

War. War is your trade. Is it not?

And it aint yours?

Mine too. Very much so.

What about all them notebooks and bones and stuff?

All other trades are contained in that of war.

Is that why war endures?

No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.

That’s your notion.

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man’s hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man’s worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

EDGY or not?

>And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? 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. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.

The whole section where they're sitting among those ruins struck me.

ITT: Post great artwork inspired by you favorite books. Preferably unofficial fan art.

pic related. This portrait of Judge Holden really sits well with me. It conveys his creepiness, without being over the top.

Blood Meridian.

It's so hopeless and dark.

Did he do anything wrong, /lit/?

>>7920409
Either he got the BIG WHITE COCK or he and the judge raped the Bear Girl, corrupting the Kid.

Maybe the Judge never raped and killed the kids but made the members of the gang do so to fuck them up morally.