Blood Meridian

[Anonymous No.19544314]

I never post here but I'm gonna guess you hear about Judge Holden a lot. More than anything, I was extremely underwhelmed by the book. The prose did not bother me at all. I admired the poetry of it. That was almost all I admired. That and the four or five funny moments, like the scene where they tell the nigger at the restaurant that he has to sit somewhere else, and some of the hardboiled dialogue, which gets old fast. There are too many characters, some of whom are interesting but most of whom are not, and who are all forgotten about with equal speed. What happened to Bathcat? Where is "The Kid", the protagonist, throughout most of the book? What is he doing throughout most of the book when he is not on the page?

The Judge is clearly the true main character, having grown more interesting to Cormac in the course of writing the book, but not to me. His tirades grow very tiresome. He starts out as mysterious, but by the end of the book he has become all too familiar: just a another prolix schizoposter who finds himself more interesting than we find him. To be generous, perhaps that was the intention.

My first impression of the Judge was that he was the result of too much thought going into a villain, too many bad ideas tossed together, Mephistopheles the giant albino pedophile lawyer for cowboys.

I read somewhere halfway through finishing the book that the Judge is supposedly a real figure from history, or at least mythology. That has tempered the harshness of my judgement, at least somewhat. But Samuel Chamberlain, the author who first attested to the existence of such a character, has been called a liar and a fabricator, and it has been suggested that Judge Holden was simply a fixture of his mind. If this is true, Cormac McCarthy is just a plagiarist and Chamberlain was almost certainly the better novelist.

Think about it: If Chamberlain's memoirs are in fact a work of fiction, then what Cormac McCarthy basically did was take the 19th century equivalent of a Frank Dux or JT Leroy "memoir", which we all know is actually a novel, and steal the plot and characters, calling it a "novel."

My copy of the book came with a forward by Harold Bloom, unfortunately. He says the whole thing is about Gnosticism and some other shit, says The Judge is the greatest villain of all time, that he couldn't finish the book the first couple of times he tried, because it was just so bloodcurdling.

I was reminded of Bloom's virulent hatred of Harry Potter. Considering that both Blood Meridian and the Potter books feature a pale Gnostic serpent villain and a nondescript boy hero with no personality, I find his taste difficult to understand.

It could still grow on me, though.

[Anonymous No.19544324]

>>19544314
I'm 19 years old.

I am handsome, smart, athletic and virile.

I have a novel that is in it's final editing stage, and a creative writing professor at my college has read the first draft and thinks it's saleable.

I have a girlfriend who is confident, articulate, playful and spontaneous.

I have a small group of interesting friends from different social and academic backgrounds, and I also have many other acquaintances who see me as a reliable source of humour and good company.

Both my parents are alive and in good health.

I have no regrets.

I have already experienced three existential crises, the latter of which was described as having the depth and profundity of a man twice my age.

I am a passionate lover, a sharp thinker, and a trader of witty repartee.

I am not self-pitying, meek or needlessly humble.

I will live a good life at your expense.

[Anonymous No.19544435]

>>19544314
Blood meridian is neither about plot nor individual characters. You are still stuck thinking in very narrow definitions of a work of fiction. Chamberlain's judge was not a fabrication but he probably did some gloating to grow their legend. McCarthy's Judge differs in many ways, primarily in that he is an interesting presence whereas in Chamberlain's memoir he is prop to elevate his recollections and to form a legend. Chamberlain's Judge is also not the fixture of his memoir or dedicated much attention which is, as you noticed, the complete opposite of BM. Chamberlain was also an artist and has depicted some of the slaughter, elements of which has made their way into BM.
The book is historical fiction that is aware of the nature of history and how it is remembered. The only witness to the actual truth is labelled a fabricator (Chamberlain). This argument basically allows McCarthy's book, labelled fiction, to have similar weight in its truth. A thing to add, Chamberlain's memoir is a small part of BM, providing it mostly with real characters like Glanton, Toadvine etc. and their backgrounds. Rest of the book is either McCarthy's imagination or a result of the many treks he took through the trail and the many historical sources he researched while creating it, some of which directly contradict Chamberlain.
Read Chamberlain's memoir, it will make your appreciation of BM richer.

[Anonymous No.19545225]

>>19544314
>>19544435
This put me thinking, no doubt nudged by the various biographies of Joseph Merrick I've been reading lately. Treves' accounts of Merrick are questionable in places, despite him knowing the man and living through the experiences which eventually made history books. These are eventually corrected, and probably still are, by various biographers who put down work to get to the "truth". What we read as history is really just the "facts" they found a 100 years later and deductions from these "facts". How much of it is a work of fiction we will not know, but we can be sure some of it is that way.

The situation is somewhat similar here. Samuel Chamberlain lived through the experience but he couldn't neither have known everything nor everything in the right detail. This is further complicated by the fact that SC was an artist (paintings/drawings) and art, as he said, was his primary motivation. So it is questionable how much of his memoir is true and how much it is SC's artistic sensibilities getting the better of him. Funnily, all acclaimed biographies and histories are susceptible to this artistic sensibility. It is what makes them great. Men's sensibility for a narrative and/or catharsis seems to overtake every other priority, worst offendee being truth. What separates history and historical fiction, in SC's and CM's case here, is the delivery. It always is. What's the difference in McCarthy's meticulous research into Glanton gang's history, a largely overlooked subject, and Howell & Ford's inquests into Merrick's life? I don't think there is much. Except one is art and other is not. One presents its research as the "truth discovered so far" and the other acknowledges the futility of such an endeavour. Both stick to the facts that are available, yet one is fiction and one "history". BM might be a subversion of, among many other things, men's intrigue in history.

>Men's memories are uncertain and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
Every historical account is to some degree fictious, but it downplays its fictions. BM, on the other hand, acknowledges them. McCarthy fills the empty spaces either with his imagination or with logic. (maybe that's why there is an abundance of landscape descriptions; the gang's trail is known and since the landscape is famously ancient, the book is able to preserve more of its truth value. The landscape is one of the few facts in this history that is undeniably true.) The unreliability of history and its only witness (Chamberlain) allows Mccarthy the space to do his thing without working against the deductible.
One last point of interest, Chamberlain was labelled a fabricator, but there was no concrete argument against his Holden. He was discredited because his version did not comply with what men wanted to believe. McCarthy made what was in SC's memoir superhuman, teetering on supernatural, only to mock people who need the world to be only a certain way.