I have been thinking about this analysis regarding the indestructibility of Judge Holden (Blood Meridian) and Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men). Is it really that the protagonists were incapable of destroying them? I have encountered this question in literature before: where the outcome may be the author’s conclusion or posture on the problem. Specifically, in Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikov is wrecked by guilt in his failed Hegelian experiment, I found myself wondering why he failed. Does that mean that everyone would?
Even among the scalphunters, men who kill indiscriminately and without passion, the judge is perceived as a primordial badness. He awaited them in the wasteland as though he would be the honored guest presiding over the red business that had yet to unfold. And when they were finished, consumed by the violence, he would go unscathed on his merry way.
Some of the scalphunters harbor the dormant notion of killing him. Toadvine drew his pistol on him when he found that he had murdered the orphaned indian child. The expriest consistently warned the kid to kill him. When the kid met Davy Brown leaving the oasis, it confirmed that they had been nursing their hatred of the judge all along. It speaks to the judge’s seductiveness and self-proclaimed immortality that he was able to dissuade such men from killing him, an act that objectively would have been no more difficult to them than abstaining.
Where they may have been demons, chaotic and bestial in their slaughtering, the judge was a devil, an ordered and sinister intelligence. Where Glanton could not return to the east and his family, and where Toadvine was wanted in California, the judge could go wherever he liked and be regarded as a king. He mocks them with his freedom: he still wears the trappings of humanity where they have been forced to shed them. He mocks them by committing crimes in broad daylight (e.g. bearing false witness against Reverend Green) only to be rewarded with cheers. He mocks them with his vast breadth of knowledge, with his channeling of ancient wisdom, with his virtuoso musicianship and dance, with his poetry, with his scientific experimentation throughout his many mock Socratic dialogues. He is the ultimate sophist, the greatest evil for Plato: the one who sees truth, and perhaps knows the rightful form of goodness, but notwithstanding intentionally chooses to make it opaque, to darken the world and to make it his shadow kingdom.
And so he is the judge. An American judge. An American judge is not directly a lawmaker, but rather the decider and interpreter of law. He is never at a loss, so mighty a judge is he, that he cannot give whatever he encounters his own interpretation. His destruction of the artifacts, his statements to the authorities concerning what happened in the desert, ensure that his version is the sole survivor. Once committed to his knowledge, he destroys it, because he does not give consent that it should persist. The earth is his “charge,” and he takes account of his realm, and dispenses his justice, which the lesser chaotic demons (i.e. Glanton’s gang) resent, while the eyes of men (i.e. civilized people) see only his luminous Luciferian charm.
There is, of course, another fan favorite: the judge as the gnostic archon with whom the kid must do battle in order to ascend to the true God, or the Supreme, or Goodness, or whatever unconditionally awesome residuum you want to call it. I personally rather enjoy this theory and recognize that it is popular because it does seem to be a rather apt model for the foregoing. Neoplatonism is really quite interesting and complex in its many iterations throughout early church history. It is a thought-provoking exercise in counterhistory to imagine what otherworld would have emerged had empire been married to a more metaphysically adventurous Christianity.
I must give a preliminary apology for this inchoate explanation of an admittedly complicated cosmological concept, but I’ll try to encapsulate it to the best of my ability, recognizing that most of this is nothing that has not been observed before by better critics than me. As it relates to the judge, his characterization is not unlike the neoplatonic concept of the demiurge. The demiurge is that original evil, a fugitive emission from the mind of Wisdom, that rules over creation as though he were God himself. He is unaware that there is anything greater, nor will he tolerate other rulers: he is the “suzerain.” He would have no god other than himself (although his Hegelian argument of war as god is another matter).
Certain, if not most, gnostics differentiated between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament, the God of Laws and the God of Love. It is an admirable attempt at internal consistency in what for many is a baffling canon. This perspective allows a stigmatic figure like Judas to come out smelling like roses (see: the Coptic Gospel of Judas). The tolerant, merciful messiah is a figure distinct from the world-deluging, city-disintegrating, sacrifice-demanding, Job-tormenting bloody Israelitic God Almighty depicted before the first century AD. When the judge gives his lecture on war as god, some among them observe that the Bible is filled with death and battle. At the very least, it is an interesting parallel.
The kid asks what the judge is “judge of.” The better question would be stated in the negative. Certainly, under the aforementioned model, he is the judge of everything in creation, his vanity divine. On a more personal level, he is the judge of the kid himself. From the moment he first sees the kid, the judge takes an inexplicable interest in him. “You alone were mutinous.” The novel could be viewed as the kid’s trial, and the judge his judge, and this can be understood in the aforementioned gnostic terms or otherwise. I do not think the judge is so much the archon standing between the kid and God so much as he is by analogy the abyss the kid must leap to join humanity, perhaps for the first time. The question, for me, is at what point the kid failed.
Was it when he threw in with the scalphunters? Was it when he failed to kill the judge, to confront and destroy evil directly, despite all those opportunities? Was it when he abandoned the pilgrims in the desert, so purposefully understated by McCarthy? Certainly, by the time he encounters the long dead abuelita and shows kindness to a ghost, or by the time he kills the Kentuckian kid, or by the time he meets the judge the final time, he has already lost.
Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men, while thematically similar, present a few distinctions between their avatars of evil and the protagonists’ self-destroying actions. I think No Country for Old Men is considerably more morally unambiguous.
I personally do not think that Chigurh warrants as much discussion as the judge. He frightens everyone. He does not integrate into society at all. He is more like the other scalphunters than he is like the judge. Unlike the judge, he did not ultimately prevail. Bell thinks he’s something new unleashed upon the earth, but despite his dreadful idiosyncrasies, he is the same brand of monster there’s always been. His bartering with the boy at the end, who would have given him his shirt for nothing, is his final and definitive defeat. Unstoppable as he may seem, monsters like Chigurh live contingent on the mercy of good people. How else could we explain the triumph of civilization over barbarism? Why is Chigurh the sensation instead of the norm?
It is clear that Moss’ destruction was directly assured when he yielded to temptation, but I think perhaps his betrayal of Carla Jean in his unsuccessful bargain with Chigurh was the more decisive fulcrum of doom. Moss’ moral failing is a lot clearer than the kid’s, because it is easier for the common reader to identify with his plight. Conversely, for the kid, there is no competing power. Nothing to encourage his rivalry with the judge, except perhaps the expriest, who is not so pure a bastion as Carla Jean.
Unfortunately, I have very little in the way of a final word on this but these are some matters I thought may prove food for thought. For me, I’m not sure the issue of these characters’ seeming invulnerability is a closed book. Causality is a tricky subject.
Note (in response to a question): As for the judge’s nakedness and baldness: I’m going to have to think about that some more. He is crowned in mud at several points, a sign of mock kingship. It could indicate that he is a false ruler. Alternatively, it could mean the opposite: the king of the earth crowned in the earth itself.
Next I will tackle the more ambitious literary comparison of Freddy and Jason...
