Holes in the Rock: The Geology of Text in Blood Meridian
Adam Krause
In My Confession, the 1840s-era memoir of scalp hunting in the American Southwest that served as the source material for Cormac McCarthy’s gleefully violent novel Blood Meridian, a disturbing figure named “Judge” Holden makes his first and only appearance in the annals of history:
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... 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. (Chamberlain 271)
Yet Holden is no mere behemoth, but a professor of the desert. He “was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico… acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names” (Chamberlain 271). Two episodes in particular demonstrate his obsession with categorizing the world around him, and with the process by which an earlier epoch is forgotten and redefined. In one, Holden is riding alongside Chamberlain in the Great Canyon of the Colorado River:
As we rode along Holden, in spite of my repugnance for the man, interested me greatly by his description of the great cut and how it might have been formed… To my question ‘how he knew all this,’ this encyclopaedian Scalp Hunter replied, ‘Nature, these rocks, this little broken piece of clay… the ruins scattered all over the land, all tell me the story of the past'. (Chamberlain 284)
In another, the scalp hunters ride toward what they believe to be the legendary white city of El Dorado, only to discover sandstone formations. Curiously docile in their disappointment, they sit still for a lengthy speech by Holden:
Judge Holden mounted a rock for a rostrum and gave us a scientific lecture on Geology. The Scalp Hunters, grouped in easy attitudes, listened to the ‘Literati’ with marked attention… Holden’s lecture no doubt was very learned, but hardly true, for one statement he made was ‘that millions of years had witnessed the operation producing the result around us,’ which Glanton with recollections of the Bible teaching his young mind had undergone said ‘was a d—d lie’. (Chamberlain 276, italics mine)
The comfortable remove of history permits the modern reader an ironic chuckle at Chamberlain’s assertion: it is of course Holden’s scientifically grounded statement which is “true,” while the author sides with the benighted Glanton, who staunchly defends the Sunday-school education he received prior to becoming a professional killer. The differentiation Chamberlain makes between “learned” and “true” is even more intriguing, however. If a statement is learned but not true, that implies that it is learned from a false book; and Judge Holden possesses the contradictory ability to accurately represent the world in his speeches, and yet speak falsely.
In his erudition, the judge is himself a sort of book. Chamberlain calls him “encyclopaedian,” and McCarthy depicts him carrying a field notebook which contains representations of the flora, fauna and manmade efforts he comes across. This book is so painstakingly constructed that the judge sometimes judges it more perfect than the original object, and scours the original from the earth:
He returned to a certain stone ledge and sat a while and studied again the work there. Then he rose and with a piece of broken chert he scappled away one of the designs, leaving no trace of it only a raw place on the stone where it had been. (173)
McCarthy performs a similar act on Chamberlain’s historical text, eclipsing it with his own imaginative consciousness. Here is his reconstruction of the judge’s controversial sermon on the rock:
He purported to read news of the earth’s origins, holding an extemporary lecture in geology to a small gathering who nodded and spat. A few would quote him scripture to confound his ordering up of eons out of the ancient chaos and other apostate supposings. The judge smiled. Books lie, he said. (McCarthy 116)
By the judge’s own lights, every book is inherently a false one because it imposes a particular process of redefinition on the reality that surrounds its pages. For a ready example, the Book which the judge refutes in the previous passage is clearly the Bible, and the Bible with which these nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans would have been familiar was the King James Bible. This influential translation, published in 1611 as the result of several years’ work by 54 scholars, became and remains the literal word of the Lord for millions of English-speaking Christians. In the case of the debate between Glanton and Holden, the Bible’s perceived status as incorruptible text allows it to define solid rock formations which vastly predate King James’ hired scholars or the scrolls they translated. Since the age of these formations can only be supposed from data available in the present, texts and representations are often the only available vestiges of a previous reality that must be taken for granted. As the judge mockingly asks the kid, McCarthy’s Chamberlain-surrogate as the reader’s steady observer of atrocities: “Did you post witnesses… to report to you on the continuing existence of those places once you’d quit them?” (331).
When critic Steven Shaviro hyperbolizes about McCarthy’s work-- “McCarthy’s sublime prose style resonates with those of Faulkner, of Melville and of the King James Bible. And by any criterion, McCarthy’s writing is as great as any of these” (Shaviro 153)--he is most likely referring, in some regard, to McCarthy’s ability to create a unique representation of the world that nonetheless feels resonant and “true.” There is a timeless quality to the way McCarthy blends the syntax of earlier literary ages – “Fine fingerbones stayed the wings with which it steadied as it walked upon him” (66) has a Melvillian flavor, to take just one of the abundant examples in Blood Meridian – which makes it plausible that his prose could slip into any number of much older texts, in the same manner that Shakespeare is falsely purported to have slipped “shake” and “spear” into Psalms 46 of the King James version, 46 words from the beginning and from the end. With similarly coincidental sleight of hand, a visitor to the Blarney Castle in Ireland who examines the Blarney Stone will see inscribed there the name Cormac McCarthy (Daugherty 173).
Returning to the judge’s discourse on rocks and books, McCarthy extends this scene beyond Chamberlain’s account in order to extract additional levels of resonance from it:
Books lie, he said.
God don’t 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. (116)
The philosophy being articulated here is an animistic one, as befitting the beliefs of the Native Americans who once peopled the land on which the judge is standing; it is also reminiscent of sixteenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who posited that God and nature both were composed of the same infinite substance with separate attributes. This substance is indivisible and cannot be conceived again. To Spinoza, text was a paramount way of expressing the properties of this substance. Consideration of an object’s nature is more valuable than simply relying on sense data to observe it:
Sense experience alone could never provide the information conveyed by an adequate idea. The senses present things only as they appear from a given perspective at a given moment in time. An adequate idea, on the other hand, by showing how a thing follows necessarily from one or another of God's attributes, presents it in its ‘eternal’ aspects… without any relation to time. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Steven Shaviro hypothesizes that the world of Blood Meridian is composed of this “Spinozistic” substance. He notes that McCarthy’s prose “observes a fractal symmetry of scale, describing without hierarchical distinction and with the same attentive complexity the most minute phenomena and the most cosmic” (154) and points convincingly to passages such as the following, where the human and the inanimate, the metaphysical and physical, are primordially leveled:
In the neuter austerity of that terrain all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence… and in the optical democracy of such landscapes all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships. (247)
If McCarthy’s viscous prose saturates his sentences, the fleshy bulk of his Judge Holden saturates the novel. Like Spinoza’s infinite substance, the judge seems to have sprung whole from some alien realm. “Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go” (309.) He looms as such an ideological and physical presence in the novel that the book in which he inscribes the properties of the world may well be Blood Meridian; not in the sense of surrogacy for McCarthy’s authorship, but in the more disturbing sense that his body is the wide, white canvas on which McCarthy etches his gory chronicle. When naked, “he shone like the moon so pale he was and not a hair to be seen anywhere upon that vast corpus… like some pale and bloated manatee” (167.) This description recalls not only the blank page but also Moby Dick, who could contain the entire text of Melville’s novel on his leviathan body. Rick Wallach has noted that the judge’s weight, twenty-four stone according to the ex-priest Tobin (128) is 336 pounds, which is the page count of the novel save for the blank page between ending and epilogue. McCarthy has not called his book The Judge, but if the kid is the surrogate for witness and reader, the judge is necessarily the text in which this hapless observer’s face is eventually buried.
This smothering takes place in an outhouse at the end of the novel, whereupon the judge “rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh” (333.) In light of the judge’s insistence on a direct parallel between reality and representation, this murder can be seen as an act by which one text critiques another.
What is to be deviates no jot from the book where it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all… Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other. (141)
Besides foreshadowing the judge’s desire to literally consume another man, this is a pretty good description of how texts work. In one of his rare interviews, granted to Richard Woodward of the New York Times, McCarthy stated, “The ugly fact is books are made out of books… The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written” (31). The question, then, is why the judge’s text necessarily consumes the kid’s and not vice versa.
Given the names of the characters involved, a Spinozistic parable can be extracted from this scene in the outhouse. The judge is discerning; he has awareness of the ideas he embodies in relation to other ideas, making him Spinoza’s model of the “adequate idea” which presents a thing in its “eternal” aspects. This is in keeping with his penchant for preserving representations. The kid, however, is bound by the passivity of his unrefined sensory perceptions, and as a creature constrained by time he has a finite lifespan. It is this disparity that the judge celebrates when he goes dancing after committing the murder, and “says that he will never die” (335.) This may also be McCarthy’s triumph over his source material, for he approaches the project with a skilled writer’s lucidity toward reconstructing the past and influencing the future; while Chamberlain, who kept his memoirs in a paper sack in his house and only showed them to family members (Chamberlain 2) was merely recording contemporaneous events.
Another metaphor for McCarthy’s intertextual performance is that of an anthropologist. Stacey Peebles, in an essay evaluating Native American belief systems in Blood Meridian, is dismissive of one of her sources, a nineteenth-century anthropologist named Eugene Trippel. She quotes him only to demonstrate his “somewhat petulant reluctance to learn the native language” (Peebles 238):
Discovering that the meager abilities of the interpreters were altogether insufficient to cope with the translating of abstract subjects, the writer was compelled to study the language for the purpose of supplying the missing words – an undertaking in itself of no mean magnitude. (Trippel 183 in Peebles 238)
More than a mere example of nineteenth-century cultural chauvinism, however, this seems an intriguing parallel to the relationship between McCarthy and the “pack of viciouslooking humans mounted on unshod indian ponies” (78) he encountered in the testimony of Chamberlain. McCarthy, in order to infuse the accounts of Chamberlain, a more straightforward interpreter, with metaphysical “abstract subjects,” had to combine, recontextualize and invent new words in nineteenth-century idiom, in such a way as to give the impression they had always been there. Like Shakespeare’s mythical revisions on the Bible, this is a Spinozistic act of reforming an idea in order to better present its eternal aspects.
Besides deepening our understanding of the relationship between source text and consuming text, Peebles’ research into the animistic theology of the Native American tribes who battle the novel’s Anglo antiheroes sheds more light on the manner in which the disparate texts of the judge and kid interact. In particular, one coincidence could not have escaped McCarthy’s research, for it constitutes the entire second paragraph of the novel: “Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall” (3.) This reference, spoken by the kid’s father, is to the Leonid meteor shower of 1833. Peebles has found that for the Yuma tribe, which massacres Glanton’s gang at a critical juncture in the book, the calendar of recorded time began with this fiery shower. This gives the kid a passing messianic significance (Peebles 239) and also links up to his last glimpse of the world before entering the outhouse, a metaphorical echo of his birth: “Stars were falling across the sky myriad and random, speeding along brief vectors from their origins in night to their destinies in dust and nothingness” (333.) The kid, ignorant of the cosmic patterns which have bookended his brief life, is in the dark about his birthright and will end in ignominy. Like the Yuma, who began to measure years from the night the kid came into the world, the kid is bound to a timeline preserved in an immutable text.