The Judge, the Idiot, and Cormac McCarhty’s Critique of Violence in Blood Meridian

Abstract

The following paper examines the relation between the couple made up by Judge Holden and the Idiot in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West. Set in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands during the mid-nineteenth century, McCarthy’s novel is an exploration of the violence underlying the march of American colonial westward expansion in which Judge Holden is a symbol of the desire to dominate others through the use of violence. As such, Holden is confronted and complemented by the figure of the Idiot. The latter works as a degraded, helpless and even more grotesque version of the Judge, and throughout the novel parallelisms and contrasts are established between the two characters. In many passages one mirrors the other; at other times, both make up a unity that reveals the full extent of Holden’s brutal ideology, with the idiot as its mute critic. Finally, the relations that this paper aims to expose may be read as a commentary on the irrationality of a philosophy that celebrates and legitimizes violence not only as a goal in itself, but also as the only way in which human beings can relate to one another.