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Article: "Witness to the uttermost edge of the world": Judge Holden's textual enterprise in Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian.'
- Article from:
- CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction
- Article date:
- September 22, 1998
- Author:
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At the center of Cormac McCarthy's epic fifth novel, Blood Meridian (1985), we find Judge Holden,(1) a Mephistophelean figure who seduces a nomadic horde of scalp hunters into a "terrible covenant" (126), which consigns both their spiritual and physical lives to the judge's jurisdiction. With his "disciples of a new faith" (130), the judge wanders the Mexican-American borderlands like an antiMoses, a lawgiver who has made no covenant with a higher power, save, of course, war. Amidst the arbitrary violence and mindless wanderings of the Glanton Gang, we find only the judge's voice, for he provides the coherence, the order, the meaning that defines the scalp hunter's ...