/lit/ - Literature

>>15114710
>Style:
The prose is vivid and finely chiseled, without a single superfluous word. The imagery is unique and majestic, of a biblical flavor. McCarthy shows off his wide lexicon and always uses precise terms instead of vague, generic ones. Sometimes he even invents his own. The vegetation is described with the precision of a botanist, and the desert and the mountains with that of a geologist. The descriptions of the landscape are evocative and suggestive without ever being purple. Sometimes they get very close to being poetry. The battles are told in a very crude, matter-of-fact way that fits very well with the atmosphere.

Now, this isn't an easy book to read. It doesn't have that je ne sais quoi that makes you forget you're reading a story. It doesn't flow effortlessly. In fact, in some passages you feel like you're mudding through a swamp. Crucial details are thrown into long sentences devoid of punctuation and full of metaphors and complex analogies. It takes legit effort to picture in your mind what the hell is going on, effort that not always pays. (inb4 brainlet. Nothing against demanding text, but it needs to be worth it. Infinite Jest wasn't the easiest read at times, but it was always worth the trouble. Same with Saramago's books.)
In the beginning, I really didn't like McCarthy's style. But now, when I ask myself if the book would've worked as well as it did with a more traditional style, if it would've had the same primal, raw atmosphere, I must admit that it probably wouldn't have.

McCarthy also refuses to use internal dialogues and even dialogue tags. He purposefully restricts his own writing arsenal in order to hone to perfection the few tools he does choose to use. He only shows us his characters through their actions and bare words, without any sort of commentary. There's no filter, as if we're witnessing what happens through a camera instead of through a person. The result is a style occasionally difficult to absorb, but certainly a perfect fit for the story he was telling.
(But goddamn, how many times can you write "naked to the waist" in a single novel? Jesus.)

>Plot:
Lol who reads for the plot? It was functional to the themes and the meaning, you can't ask more of a plot.
The ending was amazing though. Both inevitable and totally unexpected. Lots of details that previously made no sense clicked into place and the meaning of the whole book became clear. It was so good that it earned the book 2 full points.


Overall, 9/10.
A great read that will leave you exhausted and shocked but satisfied.

>>15114712
So the Judge, the only man that can't be scalped in a world full of scalpers, is Satan or some god of war, right? Cannot die, never sleeps, doesn't get old, has no clear origin, considers the blood spent in battle sacred, everyone knows him and he's everyone's favorite, the only one worthy of dancing on the stage.

>"He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die."

>"Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing."

Maybe the Judge is Death. The sentence "Et in Arcadia Ego" on his rifle, after all, is traditionally intended as pronounced by Death itself, and can be translated with "Death is omnipresent in time and space".

Or is the Judge the personification of War? Violence made sentient flesh?
Is this why he's called the Judge? Because, as he says, war is the only activity that can truly test and expose the real worth of men? Is this why he can seemingly speak every human language and is an expert in every science, because, as he says, "war comprises every science", and because every man practices war regardless of country or language?
Is this why his violence is seemingly so insensate, at times (the lynched preacher in the beginning, the pups bought and immediately drowned), and why he kills, tortures and rapes without pause and without needing a specific reason? Because war is exactly as relentless and as senselessly cruel, as unapologetically depraved?

This would make sense: everyone in that bloody era and in that specific place (the border between three hostile cultures: mexicans, americans and apaches) rode with War every minute of every day, metaphorically. McCarthy just made it literal. This would explain why The Kid was left unnamed and why when he got older he simply became The Man: he represents every man. Man just can't get rid of Violence regardless of where he wanders and how old he gets, and is eventually killed by it. Once again, the metaphorical made literal.

In the very beginning, The Kid is described as having an affinity for mindless violence, and the Judge later tells him that he had immediately recognized him the first time he saw him (as somebody with a strong connection to him, violence incarnate). War, after all, is "the ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner". But the Judge in the end will claim to be disappointed by him, because The Kid ultimately tried to get away from war instead of joyously surrendering himself to the most sacred activity (he held "clemency for the heathen" in his heart).

>>15114722
Violence is so prevalent and omnipresent in Blood Meridian that you might consider the Judge not the antagonist of the book, but the world in which the book takes place, or at least the personification of its most fundamental logic.
Blood Meridian is a book about violence and the way it controls Man, about its will to expand and encompass everything ("Those birds' freedom offends me") only to destroy everything it comes into contact with (as exemplified by the Judge and his habit of studying things before destroying them).
>"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."

People who complain about its "gratuitous violence" don't get that violence is the main character and the theme and the stage. The violence in this book is essential and inevitable. Like in life. Blood Meridian becomes therefore a microcosm of the world and of every man's life. One brutality after another and then you get killed in a toilet by an immortal giant baby.

Regardless of his exact identity, the Judge is clearly a supernatural being, that much is clear, and one of the most memorable characters I've ever come across. But did he have to rape The Kid in that latrine? That felt so gratuitous.

The final rape is kino.

>>15114810
you're kino!

>>15114728
Wait, is Judge Holden a real person?

>>15114878
Are you?

(In the book he's the personification of a concept. Hard to rape someone in a toilet if you're not made of flesh.)

>>15114878
He was apparently a real person, although Sam Chamberlain's memoir might have been fiction interwined with truth.

But yeah, he actually existed.

>>15114892
Are you? I can prove I am conscious but I can't prove you are conscious.
>>15114902
Are his actions in real life anything like they are in the book?

>>15114934
I shitpost, ergo sum.

In the memoir the Judge is described as a massive man who speaks multiple languages, is familiar even with obscure dialects, is very smart and educated in a lot of fields and always a step ahead of everyone else.
But Chamberlain's account has been accused of fictionalizing him and exaggerating his qualities.

>>15114934
Yeah, he really raped people in toilets. It is an historical fact.

>>15114934
>I can prove I am conscious
No you can't. Not to others (you might simply be a non conscious entity programmed to sound conscious) and not even to yourself (you can't prove the validity of a system using its own axioms, see Godel's incompleteness theorem).

>>15114934
I can prove I am NOT conscious. I talk with strangers on 4chan and think what we say matters.

>>15114710
It isn't summer yet, fuck off.

>>15115070
>t. a mongoloid who was plebfiltered and hates to be reminded of his inadequacy.
Just start with Harry Potter, dude. It's more at your level.

>>15115070
>lel I said summer so I'm smart

My favorite fap book.

Harrowing and beautiful book.

Judge is my bf <3

nyeheee

>>15115564
<3

>>15115564
Yes... talk to me about philosophy while you scalp children... yes... more...

/lit/ is too pleb to read this book. Maybe 3 people here have read it, and 2 of them misunderstood it.

>>15114722
>Satan or some god of war, right?
Definitely not Satan, that's textually unsupported and a lame interpretation. The only support for it is "He's evil so must be Satan!!!" Judge is more a symbol for the ugly truth of Manifest Destiny and the instrumental and ideological rationalization of the violent conquest of the westward expansion. He combines barbaric violence with intellectual acumen the same way industrialized imperialism does. This view is far more supported if you view his statements and actions and the historical situation of the novel and his role within it. More globally he is a symbol of the primal instincts for violence that drive that ideology in the first place and which have existed since the dawn of man. The kid, in contrast, embodies that germinal seed of the tendency toward violence.

There are some religious undertones to the judge' behavior, like his anti-baptism of his pet imbecile, but he does not exist in opposition to God because "War is God" in his theology. Religion in BM is distant and falsified, a faint afterthought, God is not present throughout and churches and religious symbols have been bloodied and desecrated by the anarchy of war.

>>15114710
>You thought you were reading McCarthy, instead McCarthy was reading (and rewriting) you. Faggot.
I sensed this and stopped reading right there.

>>15116117
Indeed. When The Kid's father in the beginning quotes poets long forgotten, McCarthy probably wanted to say that the old ideologies (religion included) were obsolete and surpassed in this world.

The Kid tells the Judge "You ain't nothing", and the Judge, who represents the desecration of all past ideologies, says "You're more right than you know".

>>15116145
Come on, you didn't stop reading because you "sensed" anything. You were just plebfiltered.

>>15116117
>Judge is more a symbol for the ugly truth of Manifest Destiny
>He combines barbaric violence with intellectual acumen
This.

>>15116145
>bragging about being a midwit

scalping is hot

>still reading books intead of Naruto

>>15116350
>enjoying violence desensitization

>>15116292
I rejected the perspective the book was insinuating

>>15114728
the violence in the book is so gratuitous at some point reading means you are condoning and accepting the violence - I can watch a webm of a shotgun to the face but I could not subject myself to entertain a world of such depravity as was constructed. It was literally a violence fantasy in the guise of a novel.

>the judge sat high upon his pack, judging
>i've just eaten seven pounds of refriend beans, he remarked, each bite more delicious than the last
>beans were always here
>before man ever was, supper was waiting for him
>the ultimate meal awaiting its ultimate diner

>>15117005
>the violence in the book is so gratuitous at some point reading means you are condoning and accepting the violence
My God, you really are a midwit. I was joking before, but not now.

As I said, the violence is NOT gratuitous, it's essential and inevitable in the book as in life. Accepting it certainly doesn't mean condoning it. If I accept that thousands of people die of preventable diseases every day, am I condoning it? Am I saying that's fine?

My God, what a stupid person you are. The book is a reflection on violence and its relationship with mankind, and you whine "But it was too violent..." and you even do so from a high horse, trying to claim the moral high ground! Incredible.

>>15116979
>the perspective the book was insinuating
What do you think the book was insinuating?

>>15117056
Man exists for games, and games are necessarily a stand-in for war

>>15114710
Blood Meridian was indeed great but you write like a redditor

I didn’t appreciate it until the last 4 pages. And then I had my holy hell moment.

>>15117050
yeah, but you don’t know that until the end. Honestly, I even had a few moments where I felt guilty reading it. “Why?”, is what I would ask myself every joe and then. But then it all came together. In a mystifying way...

>>15117064
THAT'S what you got out of the book?
You didn't drop the book, the book dropped you. PLEBFILTERED.

>>15117094
Same. The last page might be the best conclusion I have ever read.

>>15117112
>>15116979
>retards flailing their arms and arguing

>>15114712
>The prose is vivid and finely chiseled, without a single superfluous word

What a gigantic faggot you must be

>>15117112
>I have to know what I tdon’t use words you don’t understand.

>>15117122
The fuck you on about, felching cum guzzler?

>>15114710
no one can recommend similar books that come close to the greatness of blood meridian

>>15117141
>felching cum guzzler
yep, massive fag

>>15117163
Is this non-english-speaking day?

>>15117183
What's that? Can't hear you among all that cum and diarrhea gargling.

>>15117188
its a challenge faggot

>>15114710
hahahahahahaha oh man. This is great. I love /lit/ on quarantine.
Good job bro, I enjoyed this too much to even go along with the joke I just want you to know I'm crying, my sides are killing me

None of your opinions are original or new

>>15117226
Neither is your blasé posturing.

>>15117207
I was referring to the fact that you write like a spaz.

>>15117210
>t. another pleb plebfiltered
Don't worry, you still have Naruto to read.

>>15117107
take your pseud grandstanding back to high school english class

>>15114902
Sam Chamberlain's memoir was absolutely a fabrication, in my opinion.
Something about how a "mysteriously hitherto unpublished memoir about a fun romp in the wild west during the war vith mexico" from 90 years previous just happened to turn up in a book store in new jersey, where it was coincidentally found and purchased by a major book publisher who holds the copyright to this day, it doesn't sit right.
You should not be able to hold copyright on a book you found in a thrift store, it's just way too convenient.
I've read the memoir and the publisher's forward, and it smacks of a sensational capitalization of the 1950's cowboy craze

>>15117035
Lol

>>15114710
Should this be the first McCarthy book to read?

>>15117050
I rejected the book as fantasy of reality as much as Harry Potter. It is a book about mindless depravity couched in prose. Fornication glorified.

McCarthy is a hack

>>15117271
>grandstanding
>for explaining obvious interpretations of a book

PLEB

FILTERED

>>15117329
Don't try to use big boy words to sound smart, you're just a midwit. Your intelligence simply isn't up to the task.

>>15117338
And you're a spook

Blood Meridian had an impact on me that I haven’t felt since reading The Sound and the Fury. Thinking about the judge before I sleep makes for some great nightmares.

>>15117440
*some great fapping

Why

>>15117585
Because

I wish corncob wrote more books on the scale of BM. To use a portentous and indulgent word it achieves mythopoesis, creating an artistic statement that penetrates and goes beyond appearances and seems to give autonomous life to its world. The biblical diction and grandiosity of its prose, the luminous descriptions of an earth in ethereal radiance, the brutal truth of its harshness, combine into an aesthetic unity unlike anything else in literature. Truly an inspiration.

>>15117638
...I was about to say that.

>>15117420
ostracized by anonymous.. how will I ever cope

>>15117815
you're anonymous!

the last chapter of blood meridian made my heart race like the judge was about to burst in and shoot me dead

>>15117975
You mean rape you.

He raped the Kid.

>>15118034
what happened to the little girl

>>15118083
He raped her as a warm up.

>>15114710
Yes, the book was good, but why the hell do you write like a redditor? Fuck off

>>15118200
What are you talking about, handicap?

>>15118208
The way you describe most of the book, the way you describe the judge
>oh yeah, excelent, big, scary
Why do you write like a fucking woman reviewing his favorite bar in cosmopolitan? Fuck off mate

>>15118236
>using adjectives means writing like a redditor
Reddit is a shit website with a toxic popularity based system, but cunts like you who try to appear edgy and cooler than them by accusing everyone of being redditors are even more insufferable.

>>15118236
Gonna rewrite it /lit/ style.
>the judge was meh I guess
>bit of a spook
>I've read better in my 22 years of life
>could easily write something better than this McCarthy hack if I wanted
>I just don't feel like it

Blood Meridian resists interpretation

You fags should really take a scan through Sam Chamberlain's confessions. At least to see the judge.

>>15117226
And yet, you couldn't think of them until you read them from someone else.
Only the talentless SEETHES like this.

>>15118506
for those who are curious, this is the majority of what's said about the judge in Chamberlain's memoir-

>"The second in command, now left in charge of the camp, was a man of gigantic size called 'Judge' Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler blooded villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas; and before we left Frontreras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged him with the crime.
>"Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance, and out-waltz any poblana of the ball. He was 'plum centre' with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward. Not but that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone where he had the advantage in strength, skill and weapons, but where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first sight, and he knew it, yet nothing could be more gentle and kind than his deportment towards me; he would often seek conversation with me and speak of Massachusetts and to my astonishment I found he knew more about Boston than I did."

>>15118589
Get to the scene where they fuck.

>>15118589
>a man of gigantic size
>a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal, foully violated
*sighs*
*unzips*

>>15118589
>but where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible.
Fascinating detail.Throughout Blood Meridian the only person to challenge the Judge is the kid, who has several opportunities to kill the Judge in the desert with Tobin after the gang's collapse. There is even an instance where the kid has a clear shot on the Judge and could have shot him, but Tobin out of some awe-stricken superstition advises against it. The Judge subsequently leaves, probably sensing that he had been caught and bested.

It is for this reason that he subsequently kills the kid, executing on his inexorable logic and preying on his lack of initiative and failure to actualize his destiny of egoic survival against an opposed ego.

What would have happened if he did shoot the Judge?

>>15118663
>What would have happened if he did shoot the Judge?
The Judge would have located him, raped him and killed him all the same. He can't die. He'll never die.

>>15118663
>What would have happened if he did shoot the Judge?
The judge would have dodged it and teleported behind them.

>>15118670
Ah but if only the student became the master. As invulnerable as the judge seems his very logic exposes a vulnerability. The kid could have applied the judge's rules against him.

>>15118687
And then he would have graduated from Kid to Judge. Because there must always be a Judge, an embodiment of Violence and War. He can never die.

>>15118710
That'a a cool thought.

>>15118742
Brb writing a Blood Meridian sequel.

>>15118710
Maybe that's what the Judge meant when he said that he had had great hopes for the Kid. He wanted someone to free him from his eternal role.

>>15118236
>so afraid of reddit that adjectives are no longer permitted because its too reddit

>>15118845
>he used reddit as an adjective
fucking redditors I swear...

>>15118783
This is something I caught on to that no academic literary critic sparrowfart has. Which is the subtext of the kid and the judge in terms of maturity. The judge resembles an overgrown child and is essentially hedonistic, embracing a demiurgic chao-order-dance-game philosophy of ludic liberation. It is no coincidence that statistically the greatest purveyors of young men, as to war "young men love it and old men love it in them”. What more could explain the Judge's view of the kid? Had the kid not loved violence as a teenager he probably would have been consumed by the judge outright, instead he was the thorned sapling of his worldview. The kid's "mindless" propensity for violence resists the Judge's "mindful" propensity for it.The kid's denial of the intellectualization of war is the final straw for the judge, he refuses to think the violence he committed was anything more than a disgusting reflex, he refuses to celebrate it as a shaping cosmic process.

Judge's theme song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJIVF7VWIvU

>>15118949
>greatest purveyors
purveyors of violence

>>15118949
I always thought the Judge was described as an overgrown infant because McCarthy wanted to make him as nondescript as possible, as in "he doesn't have definite features because he's the violence that inhabits every man". But your theory is cooler.

*steals your theory and your girl*

>>15118949
>The kid's "mindless" propensity for violence resists the Judge's "mindful" propensity for it.
Well said. You are not a faggot.

lel scalping and rape

Hands down the best pedo book ever written. Better than Lolita.

so im still confused on this. did the judge rape and kill those children or was it the kid?

>>15119401
It was McCarthy.

>>15119401
It is strongly implied that the Judge rapes kids.

Nobody has ever thought the Kid might be doing it.

>>15119401
Yes.

>>15119585
The Kid is innocent! He is PURE!

>>15119656
and yet he held clemency for the savage

>>15119401
It was you, the reader

>>15119870
That only makes him purer.

P U R E

>>15117035
I found out who the judge really is

>>15119899
what about his taste for mindless violence
what about his schoolteacher father and his sister he will not see again
what about the men he killed in new orleans
what about the men he killed in texas
what about the men he killed in chihuahua
what about tobin and toadvine and the van deimenlander

>>15119939
ebin, simply ebin.

upboated. :D

>>15120000
He's pure, the world isn't. His hand was forced. Leave mah boy alone.

Also, checked.

>>15116117
Miss me with that marxist anti colonialism horseshit.

The judge is the gnostic archon of strife.

>>15120052
He's Violence incarnate, not strife.

>>15114710
>>15114712
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.

>>15120463
gee, where did that come from.

>>15120573
oh wait

>>15120463
this might be the most retarded pasta I've ever seen...