He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
Wrapping up the second half of our discussion on Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 classic, in which various chickens come home to roost.
The Glanton gang’s downfall: on the run from the Sonoran cavalry, mercy killings, greed and symbolism of coins, the takeover of the ferry, the Yuma strike back, the judge’s apocalypse-chic fashion, the Idiot plays his part (??).
On violence and human nature: Rich makes the base case that humans don’t have a ‘true’ nature but respond to local incentives, Benny finds some logic in the conservative tradition for avoiding a major upset to the fragile equilibrium of modern civilisation, and Cam adds game theoretic reasons for having a government or third party that can make credible threats of violence.
What makes the Kid different: Rich thinks he isn’t any more moral than the rest of the gang, but we end up coming up with a pretty good explanation for why the judge singles him out for opprobrium and considers him such a disappointment.
On the sunset of the Wild West: the kid becomes the man, the cycle of violence perpetuates itself, mass slaughter of the buffalo, McCarthy’s satirical skewering of manifest destiny, interpreting of the epilogue and the last dance.
Also: some general thoughts on tackling our first McCarthy, his idiosyncratic writing style, and the ambiguity around his antagonist’s true identity.
chitter chatter
Rich: Welcome to Do You Even Lit? This week we’re discussing the back half of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. When we last parted ways with the Glanton gang, they were returning to Chihuahua, festooned in scalps to a hero’s welcome, but in this half, they finally meet their downfall.
Rich: We talk quite a bit about whether humans are intrinsically violent, what kind of incentive structures and coordination mechanisms allow us to escape from violence, and just how fragile our civilizational norms are. We also come up with what I think is a pretty good answer for what makes the kid so special, some somewhat less fruitful speculation on what the epilogue means, and we give our final ruling on the judge: supernatural being or just a man.
Rich: My name is Rich and my voice sounds like this. As always, I’m joined by my friends Benny, who you’ll recognize by his charming Canadian accent, and Cam, who unfortunately does sound quite a bit like me, but is a different person in his own right. Let’s get into it.
Benny: Dude, you better not shave that moustache before I come visit. Because I want to see that thing in person. That’s a beauty.
Cam: I’ll probably keep it for a bit. I think I agree with Richard. It’s better when you have a little bit of shadow, or like a one for the rest of it.
Rich: Benny, you’re gonna sketch Cam’s moustache and measure it and then shave it off while he’s sleeping.
Benny: You’re what I imagine the ex-priest looks like.
Cam: You’ll be a bit older, right?
Benny: I don’t know, people didn’t live that long. You’ve lived long enough to be a priest, now be an ex-priest.
Cam: I’m a pre-priest trying to convince you to kill Rich.
Rich: Wait, I thought Benny’s the judge.
Benny: I’m not big enough to be the judge, I’m a tiny guy.
Cam: Same size hands.
Benny: Yeah, I’m just proportional. Also, he’s slightly more comfortable with being naked than I am, I think.
Cam: You’re skinny dipping every other week, bro.
Rich: I thought he was like a — he’s a classic CrossFit bro. He’s always working out with no shirt on, he’s always sweating.
Cam: Yeah, always topless.
Rich: Is he often pants off too?
Cam: Yeah, I think he’s often naked. But imagine that — Blood Meridian is just about CrossFit. It’s just the judge with his shirt off, doing muscle-ups and shit. That’s the meaning of life.
Rich: Yeah, the highest stakes possible — to get rhabdo.
Cam: After violence, CrossFit’s up there.
Benny: I was at some girl’s party like two weekends ago and she had this random pull-up bar on her doorframe and she was like, how many pull-ups can you do? And I was like, I’ve lived my whole life waiting for this moment, I was born ready for this moment. So now I’m going to stop doing CrossFit, now that all the training has paid off.
Rich: Whoa, don’t leave us dangling. How many did you get?
Cam: Full range? You hit 20?
Benny: Yeah, 20.
Cam: You hit 20 full range.
Rich: That’s solid.
Cam: For your first set.
Rich: For my warm-up, yeah. 20 is hard, man, that’s serious. I went on one of those carnival challenge things where it’s like a rotating pull-up bar, so you just have to hang for 100 seconds, which should be fairly easy. But Benny, maybe you understand the physics of this — I don’t — the fact that it can rotate rather than be rigid makes it so much harder, even though it’s not being driven by anything, just by your arms pulling down. It’s like on bearings, kind of like an Olympic — yeah.
Cam: As soon as you adjust, the whole thing —
Benny: Oh, the bar itself is rotating.
Cam: Yeah. They don’t tell you that. That’s why you think you can hang.
Rich: And I asked if I could do mixed grip to counteract the forces, and he pointed to the sign and it was like, no mixed grip allowed. And then I knew it was some carny bullshit.
Benny: Damn. I’ve always wanted to try one of those.
Rich: I had to try anyway.
Benny: And how’d it go?
Cam: Yeah, what’d you get?
Rich: I only got 55 seconds.
Benny: That’s pretty good.
Rich: The record for the day was like 70 or something.
Cam: 55 is good.
Benny: And did you fall into water after, or you just fell on the ground?
Cam: And how do you get the money?
Rich: Nah, just on the ground. You put up 10 bucks, and you get 100 bucks if you can do 100 seconds.
Cam: I reckon that rock-climber guy, those YouTube vids of pull-ups against random people at Muscle Beach and Ninja Warrior and stuff — I reckon he could do it.
Rich: Yeah, probably a few freaks could do it, eh?
Benny: Yeah, huge hands, huge forearms.
Rich: Yeah, my forearms were so wrecked afterwards just from one minute.
Cam: Shit, I’d have to take a break for the day.
Benny: I always wanted to do those — also the ones where they get you to start holding on and then they move over water, they start going up in the air, and when you fall off you fall like 20 feet into water.
Rich: What’s that, like Ninja Warrior kind of stuff?
Benny: I think it’s just at carnivals and stuff. But Ninja Warrior stuff also seems like it’d be fun.
Rich: Yeah, that’d be dope to just muck around on a Ninja Warrior course.
Benny: Yeah, right? So cool.
Cam: When you guys come, when I see us —
Rich: Oh, have you started training again yet?
Cam: Nah, I’m gonna wait till I see the doctor.
Rich: Are you still going to fit your pants for the wedding? Like, are you getting fatter or thinner or all the same?
Cam: I think I’m the same. There might be a small variation, I’m not counting anymore. But I think I’ll be margin-of-error the same. Don’t worry, I’ll fit the pants.
Rich: I started a mini, very low surplus bulk again. It’s so much nicer being on a maintenance plus.
Cam: Oh, yeah. So when did you stop the deficit?
Rich: I stopped like 10 days ago or a week ago. It worked really well, actually — my waist dropped 3 or 3.5 centimetres and my legs and stuff were the same size, so I lost very little muscle.
Cam: Now you’re back on the ice cream.
Rich: Just tracking and keeping the protein high. Yeah, but I’m gonna try and do low and slow, just very slowly gain weight like a year or something so that I don’t just get fat.
Cam: I can’t wait for the ice cream during the bulk curve. Ice cream, actually to be honest, it might be my favourite food. Top three foods: fried chicken, burgers, and ice cream. Ice cream might be my favourite. I fucking love that shit. It’s so nice.
Rich: Yeah, same. Let’s get some Duck Island when you’re over here.
Cam: Oh yeah. New Zealand has good chocolate and good ice cream. You wouldn’t think it.
Rich: All right. How much time have you guys got? Should we —
Cam: Yeah, we should go.
Benny: I’m unlimited, but it’s my voice, I guess, that might be limited.
Cam: Benny might just die.
Benny: I might just pass out. We’ll see how it goes.
Rich: That would be kind of metal, though — we just podcast through it. We can see him spasming in the back of the shot and we’re like, no, we’re professionals, we finished the episode.
Cam: We could finally go viral. I will never die. I will never die.
Rich: Was it crazy reading the book? Did you read it while you were feverish at all?
Benny: I had to. There was no choice. Yeah, it was fucked. While I was feverish, what I was mostly reading was their excursions after they left Chihuahua. And then for the next hundred pages basically, is them just entering these towns and killing everyone and then being chased by the occasional band of Indians and then killing all of them. And it’s like a hundred pages of that. And that was crazy to read feverish.
Benny: I was just like, what the fuck is happening? Haven’t I already read this? Hasn’t this already happened? What’s going on? They’re just skinning everyone in sight.
Cam: It never ends.
Benny: And then I’d be like, did I miss some sort of triggering event that made them do this? What made them kill all these people? I’d go back a few pages and be like, no, no, there was no trigger event. They just absolutely decimated this town for apparently very little reason.
Cam: You’re like, the more I read about this Glanton guy, he just seems like a real jerk.
Rich: I’m starting to think that they’re the baddies.
Cam: Yeah, yeah.
Rich: Damn, that would have been crazy. I even found that section a bit of a slog, and I was in perfect rude good health. It’s almost a bit boring, even dare I say it. I mean, Cam, why don’t you take us through the plot beats?
The Glanton gang’s downfall
Cam: Yeah, so like last episode, we left off with the gang returning to Chihuahua City to a hero’s welcome with their 120 scalps. And, you know, they essentially outstayed their welcome. There’s even a bit of writing in the streets saying like, we’re better off with the Indians. So they eventually leave this Chihuahuan desert area and they head towards the Sonoran desert, which is kind of the west coast of Mexico, and strike a new deal with the governor there to give some more scalps. But they go out and kill another group and come back, and an army is waiting for them — Mexican cavalry, 500 men, led by General Elias.
Rich: So did you guys understand that they were contracted by the Sonoran government, and then they get into a fight with the Sonoran cavalry, and I couldn’t quite piece together what happened? Like, did their deeds catch up with them and the narrator just doesn’t say it, and you have to infer that they’ve figured out that these guys have been slaughtering and leaving destruction?
Cam: I thought maybe it was a diversion tactic. They said, yeah, go get us some scalps, and then we can get the army in and wait for you. Because they potentially had already heard about this gang. Or, you know, they flipped for some reason, or General Elias had a different attitude than the governor. And, you know, some of the gang members get injured, and they have to draw straws of who kills them. And the kid has to. And he chooses to let them go.
Rich: So is it merciful that he doesn’t kill them? Basically, the Delaware Indian gets left behind to kill his compatriots and he just brutally stoves their heads in right away and then just leaves, no fuss. The kid has this long dialogue with the guy that he’s meant to kill, and there’s a back and forth. But it wasn’t obvious to me — would it be more merciful to kill him or more merciful to leave him? Because he reckons that if you leave him alive, General Elias’s men are going to do much, much worse things to him and he will wish that he was dead. So I don’t know how that’s meant to reflect on the kid’s character exactly, except that he doesn’t like taking lives.
Benny: The fact that he considers it either way is at least reflective of the fact that he’s a reflective character, as opposed to everyone else who’s just like, I have this job to do, obviously I’m just going to do it. So even if there’s no right answer maybe in that situation, it’s just indicative of something different about him, the fact that he’s like, oh man, I don’t want to kill this person, but maybe I should — maybe that’s actually for the best.
Rich: True. But then the meta question is, why does Glanton make the men draw lots to do the killings in the first place? It’s interesting that he considers that a necessary duty rather than just leaving them there to die, or dispatching them on the spot without any ceremony. So what’s that about?
Cam: Yeah, why doesn’t he do it? Maybe he wants an initiation for the gang. Maybe he wants everyone to show that it’s a strong commitment device.
Benny: It might just be a plot device by McCarthy in order to show the kid’s character a bit. It also could have been contrived by the judge — because I think when the kid is drawing straws, he finds the judge looking at him. And so the whole situation might have been contrived by the judge in order to test the kid’s character. Like, what’s he going to do here? Because I think it’s fair to say the judge wants the kid to just start killing people ruthlessly and be like him, right?
Rich: And the judge is also very good at sleight of hand and magic tricks and stuff.
Benny: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think we are supposed to assume that the judge — yeah, and he changes straw right at the last second.
Cam: Yeah, the judge looks at him, so then he changes. And he changes to the shorter one. And then he looks back and the judge isn’t looking at him.
Benny: And then he still draws the short straw.
Rich: Yeah, it’s another nice little nod of, well, I think it’s the fatalism of this book, right?
Cam: Yeah, you’re like, fuck, 4D chess.
Rich: It’s like, no matter what you do, all roads lead to death, or at least to violence.
Benny: At least to whatever the judge wants to happen.
Rich: And there’s no escaping it. But the kid does escape it. He doesn’t kill the guy in the end, right? He leaves him and he gives him a drink of water at least.
Cam: Yeah, and he not only leaves him — he hides him in a bush. He goes out of his way hiding him in a bush, and he comes back to give him water. It’s obviously showing that this kid has this mercy in him, which the judge comments on later in the book, and isn’t evident in a lot of this land. There have been a few instances — a woman very early on helping the kid, some random Mexican strangers helping the kid, later on a woman helping the idiot. Again, question of whether that’s the right thing to do, but it sort of shows this moral pulse in him.
Cam: It’s funny, I feel like every dude’s kind of wondered, like, you know, if you’re this 20-year-old at war back in the day and your best mate is suffering, do you put him out of his misery or not? That being a hard thing to do.
Rich: I’d be doing you a favour, man. Yeah. Anyway, speaking of contrived plot devices, maybe part of it is that it gets the kid separate from the rest of the gang. So he ends up roaming through the wilderness trying to avoid Elias’s scouts. He loses his horse. He ends up with just his pistol sort of scrambling around in the snow. And then there’s this one scene that I thought was worth mentioning at least, which is that he spies a fire out on the plain and it’s been burning for a while. He’s trying to see if there are any men around it, if they’re friend or foe. And then he gets close and it turns out that it’s just a tree that’s been hit by lightning and has set on fire.
Rich: This is meant to be a biblical parallel to the burning bush, where Moses comes across the bush in the desert or on a mountain or something. And the bush is burning, but without being consumed.
Cam: Nice catch.
Rich: So it doesn’t burn up, it just burns. And then secondly, the voice of God is emanating from the bush and talking to Moses, saying, here I am. And it’s just a nice little dis-parallel that, you know, in McCarthy’s world, the bush is not sacred and God is not there. What seems to the kid to be something of symbolic importance just turns out to be a normal part of nature’s violence, basically empty of any higher meaning or spiritual significance. But also, at least it’s providing light and warmth to some woodland creatures, including to the kid.
Cam: I think he even sleeps for the day. So you’re sort of thinking, all these biblical allusions, we’re often meant to juxtapose Blood Meridian’s world as a world that’s godless or evil, rather than the opposite.
Rich: Yeah, I think so. Like maybe not even evil-evil, but just amoral. Something we could maybe talk about now is this gnostic interpretation that the world of Blood Meridian — or the world we live in — is the false world of violence and deceit ruled over by a false god, a demiurge, and it’s very hard to attain spiritual knowledge and gnosis and escape this world. So you see glimmers of it maybe in the kid, but most things are not — I don’t know what I’m saying.
Cam: No, no, that’s fine. The gnostic reading is meant to be this idea that you have these flickers of hope from divine — from the real god.
Rich: Yeah, signs and symbols.
Cam: Yeah, and you don’t really have that, but it’s just the kid’s mercy or the kid’s unwillingness to buy into the judge’s frame as signs of that. Potentially the judge themselves definitely feels like this kind of evil god. I’m just gonna get my charger, I’ll be back in a sec.
Rich: Yeah, we’ll come back to that. But Benny, do you want to catch us up on the next plot beat, which is around the taking over of the ferry, and how that pans out for the gang?
Benny: Yeah. So the kid makes it back to the gang. The gang comes across, I guess, the Colorado River, right? And they find a ferry that’s being manned by a doctor, Dr. Lincoln, who’s ferrying people across for $1 each. In short, they basically conspire with a group of Yumas to take over the ferry. But then they, surprise surprise, betray the Yumas and just take charge of the ferry themselves. They become very rich doing this, first charging crossers exorbitant fees, and then this just devolves into outright theft and killing people who are trying to cross and all this stuff. They threaten the doctor, and the doctor just ends up hiding in his hovel, basically.
Benny: But then we have the downfall of the gang, which the reader, I’m not sure if we’re expecting at this point, but you’re almost relieved by it. It’s like a weird headspace that McCarthy puts you in as the reader. The Yumas basically organize a counterattack, I think a few weeks later, or a few days later. And they sneak into the camp at night and just kill most of Glanton’s gang, including Glanton himself. And the remaining people basically scatter.
Cam: They slice Glanton with an axe, right?
Benny: Yeah, like just cleave his head, I think, or something.
Rich: And burn his body.
Benny: Yeah, we should maybe talk about the idiot or the imbecile here a bit, which I don’t think we have yet. I’m not sure how important you guys think he is to the story, but he seems like an interesting —
Cam: He’s the protagonist for me. Saw the world through his… simple, mate. I saw what the judge saw in him.
Rich: Cam’s like, finally a character I can identify with. But just for a second before that, Benny — as you guys hadn’t read this book before, I didn’t think to react to it, but did you expect the gang would get their just desserts at some point and you were like, yeah, this tracks? Or were you kind of surprised that they were not in fact immortal and that events would eventually catch up with them?
Benny: I was surprised, I think. I at least didn’t think it would devolve so fast. And I think if you’d asked me beforehand, I would have said it devolved because of inner turmoil within the group itself. I would have thought that people basically started fighting and then someone wanted to kill Glanton because of something he had done or because of something the judge had done. And then this would have caused too much internal strife and the group would have imploded. So to have them just be beat by another group from the outside at night and taken unawares, basically, like they had done to so many groups previously, was surprising. And it just all unraveled so fast. Like within the course of a couple pages, it was just all over and most of them were dead. And then the rest were just scattered to the wind. So yeah, I was caught off guard and surprised for sure. Cam?
Cam: I mean, it had been building in the sense that the gang, although they were very successful with their violence, things had been going to shit for a while. They’re pissing everyone off. And even just before the Yuma Indian takeover, they send a couple of the gang members out to San Diego for supplies and all that kind of goes to shit. They just always go straight to the whiskey. I feel like their vulnerability had been building somewhat.
Cam: In terms of whether you’re happy that happens — I feel worried about the kid, right? We were talking about all these violent excursions around the Chihuahua desert region, and it’s never clear exactly what the kid’s doing this whole time. We talked about that last episode — it’s not clear who the kid’s killed in terms of this morbid violence. You’re not actually sure what the kid’s doing. We’ve talked about his kind of moral pulse, and potentially Tobin has some morality too.
Cam: I thought one interesting thing was Black Jackson, the gang member — he’s the first to die, right? And it’s this cool scene, you could almost imagine the movie scene. They get back and Black Jackson bends over and he finds a coin — coins are symbolic in this novel — and then it’s just out the corner of his eye, this sharpshooting Yuma Indian strikes him from behind. And then suddenly they swarm on the boat and take everyone. Why Jackson died first —
Rich: Classic horror movie trope, the black guy dies first.
Cam: Pretty much the entire gang on the ferry dies, except for the kid and the ex-priest Tobin escape, and Toadvine escapes, and the judge escapes. There’s a scene that — I actually wondered if the judge knew it was fucking happening, because they break into the room and he’s kind of waiting for them. He’s got this howitzer, like a small cannon type thing — earlier on, that’s what the gang took over to seize the ferry. They had this howitzer and I think a couple of the gang members needed to work it, like two guys needed to carry it and work it. And then there’s a scene in the room where the judge just has it under one arm, and he’s got the idiot under his other arm, and he’s just waiting for them. And then he escapes.
Rich: And he’s holding a cigar and he’s going to use the cigar to charge the powder.
Cam: That’s right.
Rich: That’s pretty badass.
Cam: Yeah. It’s almost like a Die Hard fucking scene. But I wondered if he kind of knew it was set on.
Rich: I don’t think so. I think he’s in a further-away room, he can hear the commotion and stuff because he’s kind of caught — I think he’s naked or half-naked, there’s some young catamite or something in his room. And he’s just wrenched the howitzer off of its emplacement. But yeah, the key thing is, those are the ones that escape: the judge and the idiot.
The Idiot
Rich: So Benny, do you want to say something about the idiot? Like, do you have a theory on his significance? Basically, the judge loves the idiot and takes him with him throughout a large part of the rest of this book.
Benny: And saves him at some point — saves him from drowning.
Rich: He saves his life, yeah. The backstory is that they pick up this traveler who wants to go to California. They charge him 100 bucks to take him under their safe passage to California. He’s travelling with his brother, who is a handicapped person, who’s non-verbal and severely disabled.
Cam: I think he’s eating feces when they first meet him in the cage. He’s chewing on —
Rich: Yeah, he’s in a cage eating his own shit, and his brother is selling — he’s like a travelling freak show, selling tickets to see the idiot. But yeah, the judge takes him under his wing and takes him with him when they’re leaving the massacre at the ferry. I got nothing to say about it yet. I don’t know if you guys have any theories.
Cam: Well, when they get on the ferry, there’s this woman there, described as a huge woman. She views it as disgusting that this guy’s in this cage and she bathes him, takes him out of the cage, and they burn the cage. And it’s like, watching the cage burn — at one point everyone else thinks there’s significance to him watching his cage burn. But then that night he escapes and starts drowning in the river, and the judge — I’m almost imagining a big hand just dipping in and pulling him out — and saves him. And then takes him with him when he escapes. You see him later on, he’s on a leash, right? And the judge has this big umbrella made out of hide and bones. I’m always imagining those aristocratic women, you know, the start of 101 Dalmatians or something, walking their dogs.
Benny: This huge pale naked albino with an umbrella made of horse skin is leading this kid through the desert.
Rich: This little pet. And he’s even made the idiot some clothes. He makes him a hat out of reeds to protect him from the sun a little bit.
Benny: I mean, and we should say, the idiot is portrayed as not even really knowing how to feed himself and not knowing how to drink and stuff. So the judge really is helping him survive. There’s no hope for this kid unless the judge is there by his side 24-7 helping him manage himself.
Cam: Yeah, it’s certainly going to get in the way of just getting around — it’s going to be annoying for the judge to have this extra guy with him.
Rich: Yeah. Extra food, extra water, making noises, slowing them down.
Cam: That’s obviously important to him.
Benny: It’s this fascinating juxtaposition — this judge who’s ready to kill anyone else who gets in his way is now going out of his way to help, for lack of a better word, this idiot survive the harshest desert conditions on the planet. My main thought about it was that the judge only views killing as a justifiable or even noble act if you’re killing people who could potentially kill you, or killing people who have the will to also engage in acts of war and stuff. And because the idiot is basically unable to author himself, he in some sense doesn’t have the same free will that everyone else has, then it’s not justified, according to the judge’s warlike epistemology, to actually murder him.
Cam: Just the Comanche and Apache aren’t fair game, as well as five-year-old —
Rich: Yeah, he kills toddlers, he shoots those dogs. I don’t know about that.
Cam: Mexican girls and boys.
Benny: So maybe it’s just the arbitrariness of this world, right? Like some people he’s going to save and some people he won’t.
Rich: There’s one point later on where he’s accusing the kid, and he says something like, even the idiot played his part in good faith. And I was like, what part did the idiot play? I have no idea what that even means.
Cam: Yeah, it’s also like the sickest burn. Like, you’re a sorry day for the gang — Black Jackson does this, Glanton does this, even the idiot.
Rich: Yeah, it’s like the kid’s getting told off.
Cam: He’s pulling his weight, right? Come on, sort it out, yeah.
Rich: I mean, just on the point of Sarah the woman pulling him out and burning the cage and cleaning him up — that’s a very nice little counterpoint to the rest of the violence and a glimmer of hope, or gnostic knowledge if that is the point, that acts of kindness and mercy absolutely exist in this book. And it’s not even a family member — his own family member is dragging him around in the freak show. She’s just a good woman, she’s only just set eyes on the guy, and she liberates him and restores him some measure of personhood.
Cam: Yeah, I thought the fact that he immediately was going to die when he got free was kind of saying also, maybe being free wasn’t good for him. But I think it’s mainly showing there is this mercy that exists in the world.
Cultural technologies for reducing violence
Cam: Well, I mean — I’ll just ask you guys, because I’ve got some points around this — we mentioned last time whether or not violence is part of human nature. That’s the hard thing for me when we’re reading this. There’s so much violence and the judge has essentially these philosophical theories that violence is everything, violence is the world, violence is eternal, violence is the one part of agency we have in this nihilistic world. And you’re horrified by the judge, but we do kind of have to reckon with the fact that violence is this universal thing — over history and all cultures, whether or not you want it yourself, it seems to be ever present. And it’s hard to immediately say the judge is obviously wrong — maybe some of his philosophy is, but in this aspect of the importance of violence, you know.
Benny: The rape. The rape in particular, I would say.
Rich: We’re agreeing with the judge a lot in this episode.
Benny: Cam just stops there.
Rich: The judge did nothing wrong.
Benny: End scene.
Cam: Benny’s thesis: the judge doesn’t harm anyone that isn’t also part of the violent —
Benny: Isn’t also culpable in some way. He’s actually just a reflection of each person.
Cam: He’s misunderstood, you know.
Cam: Loin of my life, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul.
Benny: Falling of my life.
Rich: Yeah, Nabokov wasn’t edgy enough. So now we’ve got to overcorrect.
Cam: We need to read the judge’s fucking sketchbook. That would have some good —
Rich: It’s just full of cocks.
Benny: I’m just full of cocks.
Cam: He’s just drawing fucking massive dicks throughout his whole book.
Rich: Just big veiny dicks.
Benny: Nothing exists in this world unless I have it in my notebook, and it’s all dicks.
Cam: Everyone’s talking about the judge’s small hands.
Rich: All right, Cam, to take your question though, let me try and give the starting-point basic-bitch answer, which is —
Cam: Violence is bad.
Rich: Violence is bad. No, the human nature point. Okay. So humans are a type of animal that have evolved behaviours, right? Psychology is also evolved, and they’re incentivized to do certain things to further the propagation of their own genes essentially. That’s what life is. Everything ultimately comes from that. And then to the extent that we ever manage to deviate from that, it’s because we have crystallized knowledge that lets us cooperate. And again with the cold hard logic being that cooperation, where we can all do better by coming up with ways to not be violent, we do it not really because we’re good, but because it leads to a better outcome — it’s a positive-sum outcome if we can figure out that coordination problem. And the course of moral progress is us getting better and better at finding coordination mechanisms in the forms of technology, governance, new abstractions, concepts of crime and retribution and justice and so on.
Rich: But if those institutions suddenly were taken away from us, or even if they just devolved slowly over time, I think we would go immediately back to being violent animals. And I have a dark view that basically my entire model of human behaviour is, people respond to incentives, and that’s everything essentially. And that could be soft incentives in the form of social approval or censure as well, but that’s just norms that might be specific to some particular community at a certain point in time. Whereas the human nature is the bit that’s unchanging.
Cam: Or it could be scalps at $100 a pop.
Rich: Yeah. So starting there, where do you go from there?
Cam: I mean, I’ve got some thoughts. I just wonder if I’ll let Benny chime in and cough a little bit.
Benny: If you were here, there’d be some violence right now, I’m telling you. Rich and I had extremely similar thoughts. I would put slightly different topspin on it maybe and appeal to something like political or cultural conservatism. I think this is the point of conservatism as a tradition — to realize that you can’t get further down than violence. Violence is sort of the status quo of communities that aren’t working well with each other. And then we’ve had to develop all this sophisticated cultural technology in order to escape this condition where everyone’s just at war with everyone else and there’s a certain amount of baseline trust. And the conservative tradition emerges as this recognition that if you change something too fast you risk devolving back into the state of nature where it’s a war of all against all, and we want to avoid that at all costs. So you have to be extremely careful about what you change and how fast you change things — and that’s why you need a tradition of political conservatism.
Cam: So leftists just want to kill everybody.
Benny: Well, I think you also need progressives, right? Because you need people who are pushing for the change, and you need to find this balance between people who are wary of change and want to implement it slowly and incrementally, versus people who are spotting all these problems and want to push for change in the first place. So I think they both have their role, but I think especially you need to listen to this criticism that says, as bad as you think things are right now, they can get significantly worse, right? We live, especially in the West, in like the midst of a very cooperative society where most people can trust that most things get done with relative efficiency and relatively well, right? When you book a flight or you buy groceries or you go to your bank and you get cash, like most of the time, you’re actually not worried that something underhanded is being done there, that you’re being sold super dirty food or that you’re not actually being sold the plane ticket. When you show up at the airport, you actually want to take a flight where you need to take it. And that’s sort of a miracle, right? So you should be very wary when you’re proposing large-scale changes to a society that operates like this well. Yeah. So that was a long-winded way of saying — I guess violence is, in fact, bad. Boo, boo violence.
Cam: I mean, yeah, in one sense voting is kind of a substitute for violence, right? But back to the human nature question — this debate’s been going on for hundreds of years, maybe even thousands of years. I remember reading about ancient Chinese thinkers, Xunzi and Mencius. Mencius was first — this is around Plato’s time, a little bit after Plato — and he wrote that human nature was fundamentally good and humane, and that society corrupts nature, and we have to fight off that influence. And then like six years later, Xunzi was kind of the opposite — we’re fundamentally bad and violent, and society is this force of good.
Cam: It’s funny — one reason why I sometimes get mixed up is that the contemporary writer Curtis Yarvin’s pseudonym was Mencius Moldbug for ages, and I don’t think Yarvin probably views human nature as fundamentally good, like Mencius does. And there’s also this point where Mencius and Xunzi are maybe saying the same thing — we have this good aspect to us, as Steven Pinker might say, “the better angels of our nature,” and it’s about cultivating that. And we also have these inner demons. So this maps quite nicely onto —
Rich: Does this map onto Rousseau and Hobbes as well? Is that a more contemporary —
Cam: The Western thing of Rousseau and Hobbes. And again, it can somewhat be reductionist to have a complete dichotomy. There are passages in Rousseau where he out-Hobbses Hobbes, but in general I think it holds. Rousseau has this view of the noble savage as the negative spin on it — this view that they were born good and society makes us bad and puts us in chains. And Hobbes has this view that the state of nature is this war of all against all. He’s got that sentence that everybody knows, of nasty, brutish and short, which is at the end of a really beautiful paragraph as well.
Cam: I don’t want to do too deep a reading into Hobbes, but I actually got this from Steven Pinker talking about Hobbes in his Better Angels of Our Nature. The thing he really gets right is Hobbes’s insight that violence being so prevalent and so universal is this kind of game-theoretic thing where the way of fixing it is essentially just to change the payoffs. We’re always stuck in these kind of prisoner’s dilemma games, and you have to change the payoffs, otherwise there’s incentive for violence.
Cam: Hobbes talked about three main causes of violence. He called them gain, diffidence, and glory. You can translate it: gain is competition, so we want to do better than our peers. Diffidence is more like — instead of shyness, now it’s more like fear. So you can be scared of others and preemptively want to strike them. And then glory, the way of thinking about it is maybe like reputation, which is kind of related to the first two, I suppose. But you want to build a reputation that you’ll strike back.
Cam: And I think the tragedy of it all is, even if you don’t want violence yourself, you’re worried that your neighbour does, and so you want to preemptively strike them. And even if you think your neighbour doesn’t want violence, you’re aware that he’s worried that you might strike him, so he might preemptively strike. So I have to preemptively strike him. And so even if no one wants it, we’re suddenly in this prisoner’s dilemma dynamic, where if you defect, you can be better off, and then you have to preempt that.
Cam: And the way of changing these payoffs — Hobbes called it a Leviathan, the government, essentially someone that can say, if you fight, I’m going to send you to prison or something. And then suddenly the payoff’s not worth it. Now you do have this problem of who guards the guards, and Hobbes never really — it’d be lovely to have him at a dinner party to talk about that. I’m sure he’d be insightful. But that aside — and it’s not just the state of nature. As soon as, if you go into the New York or New Jersey-run mafia, the Sicilian mafia — you know, in The Godfather, there’s a scene where the father saying, if my son is struck down by lightning, I will blame you. And I will come. He has this credible threat of violence, and you need that.
Rich: But you don’t need the Leviathan to be — I don’t know if this is what you’re saying, but it doesn’t need to be a government that’s democratically elected or anything, right? Like, the Godfather’s willingness to dispense violence can create better outcomes for all of the soldiers — for instance, to not rat on each other. If the Godfather credibly says, if you rat on your fellow mafiosos, you will die, then that’s actually a better outcome for everyone, to have that credible threat of violence, because again, it changes the game theory. It makes it much more costly to defect. Is that what you’re saying?
Cam: Sure. I was actually more thinking of inter-gang warfare. As soon as you don’t have someone you can — you know, if you get stolen from, you can’t just rely on the police and the government because you’re also doing illegal activity. You have to have this credible threat of violence to deter people from doing it. That was kind of my point. There’s an incentive for violence, but as soon as you have a police that you can trust — yeah. I mean, Hobbes himself was like a monarchist —
Rich: Yeah, so the point is, for any group of people there needs to be some credible threat of retribution or violence or taking away of liberty by some third party.
Cam: It doesn’t necessarily need to be democratic, but it does need to be this third party. And as soon as you get into the Wild West, there’s this recipe for violence. And maybe this is why people like Glanton and the judge go there — this is the environment they’re thriving in. I mean, what’s interesting is Glanton doesn’t want to go back to Texas. At one point they’re at the border and he’s like, I can’t go back there. And you find out he’s got a wife and kids there, and he’s like, I’m a wanted man there. Which is kind of odd, because he’s a wanted man here as well.
Rich: I think there’s something there about the westward expansion, right? And like McCarthy’s satire of the idea of manifest destiny, of “go west, young man” — where if you just keep moving and keep exploiting new lands and fucking over new people, that’s the strategy. Your tickets never come home to roost. And interestingly, the moment they stop moving, they take over the fortification at the river, they take over the ferry — that’s when events catch up with them. How far west is Sonora? Is it fully west? Because that would actually be a great symbol if it is, if that’s as west as you can get.
Cam: Yeah, well, it’s fully west — fully west of Mexico. And then you just have to go further north to California, and it’s even further west. So it’s kind of under New Mexico. There’s a comment even later on when the kid escapes with Tobin and Toadvine — and I can’t remember if it’s Toadvine — but one of them says, he’s run out of country, he can’t go with him because he’s wanted. So it fits what you’re saying, right? They’ve exhausted everywhere.
Cam: But anyway — getting back to the point — there seem to be these incentives in human nature, descriptively, of why we always lead to violence and why that always happens. But the judge goes further than that. He’s prescriptive — like, yes, and this is good, and this is the only thing we have. It’s almost like that’s how you get agency. You stare violence in the face and you play this game for high stakes. We usually think of morality itself as our way of getting agency and meaning in this nihilistic world, and he views it as violence. Which, you know, if you’re a nihilist, maybe it’s just as arbitrary as anything else to pull yourself up with your bootstraps. And he kind of has a gotcha when everyone pushes back — when the gang members say no, you’re crazy, he’s like, what are you guys doing? Look what you guys are all doing. Maybe they’re not as bad as Glanton, but it’s hard for them. Even the priest is pushing back, and he’s like, well, you’re not a priest anymore. There’s a reason you’re with us, and you’re not impressed.
Rich: Yeah, he says, you don’t need to say a word, priest — you’ve given all that I could ask of you, or something. Because it’s like, revealed preference. He’s out there playing the game of war, which the judge is obsessed with, instead of playing the game of god-bothering.
Cam: Yeah, yeah. But then potentially the kid’s choosing not to play.
Rich: Can I just quickly lay out a bit of the judge’s philosophy from his mouth so that everyone knows what we’re talking about? So first of all, he says the thing about war enduring and about how war was there before man, and it was sort of in some sense waiting for him — the ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner, the way it was and always will be. Which we’ve talked about, the nature of human violence. But then the other thing he says is, linking it up to games — that men are born to play games, and there’s nothing else to do except play games. Every child knows that playing games is more fun than honest work, and that the worth of a game is not inherent in the game itself, but the value of what you put up at stake. And so that’s why the judge is particularly interested in war, which he considers the highest possible calling because you are putting everything at stake. And that’s the way that you can maximally be alive in the world, I think.
Rich: And so the others, as you say, they don’t really agree with the judge. A lot of them are pushing back on it. And yet he says, here you are, right? Like, here we are playing god, making war.
Cam: The other aspect to the judge’s philosophy is, he talks about morality, and he says something like, you know, morality was invented by the weak to control the strong. And it’s just all cope. So as soon as you say, we’re making this moral process, that’s all just to control us — the strong. And it sounds very Nietzschean. I mean, we’re not Nietzsche scholars, maybe it’s Nietzsche gone haywire in the judge’s hands. But it certainly echoes death of God, death of morality, and the strong will to power type stuff.
Rich: There’s some kind of historicism in here as well, I think, where he talks about — historical law subverts it at every turn, referring to subverting the slave morality. And, you know, if a man has an idea and he falls dead, it doesn’t say anything about whether he was in error as to his views, but the willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute. So he thinks there’s some way in which taking action of this kind gives you the ultimate justification or answer. I mean, I guess it is just a fancy way of saying might makes right, actually, right? Is it any different to just — everyone says might does not make right, and then I think the judge in fancy words basically just says, yes it does, or rejects the concept of right. But it amounts to the same thing.
Cam: I think it’s essentially that. One thing I’m confused about is when the judge says — I think you said the quote earlier — like, you know, nothing exists unless he knows it. What was it exactly?
Rich: Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge, exists without my consent.
Cam: It’s good that he’s talking about consent a lot.
Rich: So the judge —
Cam: To be honest, that sounds cool, and I can imagine that on someone’s Instagram with like a nature background. I’m sure I don’t fully get it. It’s just — I was just pointing to his dominion, wanting dominion.
Rich: I weirdly relate to it a little bit, like wanting to know everything. Don’t you sort of have a little fantasy around that? And feeling like — I don’t know if I feel mad at the things outside of my knowledge themselves, but I feel mad about the state of the world in which I don’t know everything, you know?
Cam: Yeah, I felt guilty. I’ve done a family history deep dive recently, and in some sense, everyone’s like, oh, it’s cool, you get in touch with your family. But I was like, no, this is the exact same impulse that I have of like Wikipedia and the whole list of dinosaur names or some shit. I just wanted to know it all. And I was just like, oh my god, this is just like this autistic need to like — like the judge. You just want it all in your head. And we’re classic examples of that. We write so many notes, we do fucking flashcards. But, you know, when you tell normies that you do flashcards, they’re like, what the hell? But it’s just all to have it all in our knowledge. Otherwise, you know, it’s not in my consent or whatever.
Rich: And it is funny actually that you mentioned it — like, when I die, all of my facts will just die with me. Not that dissimilar to the judge. They will just be scrubbed out of existence. I’m not trying to hide them from other people.
Benny: No, you got to make your own graph public, dude. That’s why you got to make all your knowledge source public.
Benny: I wonder if his quote earlier wasn’t necessarily just paraphrasing “might is right,” but is trying to point to some deeper principle, namely that of freedom. So my sense of the judge a bit is, you want to be ultimately free to do whatever the fuck you want, whenever the fuck you want to do it. And so it’s less that might is right — it’s more that to be ultimately unconstrained by whatever is going on around you is moral perfection in some way. And so this is why you see him doing absolutely, from our point of view, unhinged things, like earlier in the novel when he saved that little Apache kid, right? Brought him around with them for a couple of weeks and then just killed him on the spot. Or the fact that he brings the idiot around with him on a leash. These things that just look totally bizarre and pointless from our point of view, but are actually him exerting his will on the world and just saying, like, I’m totally free to do whatever I want right now. And so might-is-right is sort of a downstream consequence of that. But the primary motivation or the primary goal there is just ultimate freedom in the moment.
Benny: And maybe he views — the way he attached himself, or the reason he attached himself, to something like Glanton’s gang is, they were able to sort of inhabit that headspace with him. He was able to bring them along on that journey, just saying, do whatever you want, even if it involves killing people in the same group, like White Jackson versus Black Jackson — that’s all permissible, that’s all OK, because if the mood strikes you to kill this person, that’s great. But then the kid was trying to appeal to some sort of greater moral authority beyond just personal freedom. And that is what he couldn’t stand, right? And so then he was like, OK, the kid now is my nemesis.
Cam: Yeah, that’s what pissed him off.
Rich: Yeah, I think that’s right. He’s definitely obsessed with freedom — at the upstream of everything, you could presumably choose to do whatever you want, but you need to feel totally unconstrained by others or by conventions or by nature or by anything.
Benny: Yeah, or even your past self somehow. Like, even your past decisions — okay, you chose to save this kid earlier, now you’re going to kill them.
Rich: Yeah, he says, you stood in judgment against yourself, or something. That’s important as well — not to recriminate with yourself.
Cam: It’s funny, because the appealing aspects of when you think of like Nietzsche’s übermensch, Dostoevsky’s extraordinary man — there’s this freedom of just creating, whether it’s art or institutions. You just this will to power, not being cucked by something and creating things. But then this violence, you know, we don’t like, but it is this kind of paradox of nature. Like, you can’t have untrammeled freedom without that as well, right? Otherwise, you’re always going to be constrained by, as the judge would say, the morality of the weak.
Rich: Yeah. And having freedom means having to put something up at stake, I think, as well. That is important. And here’s the question for you guys — if the judge is supernatural in some sense and he can never die, as he says, what are the stakes for the judge? I feel like it undercuts his own argument a little bit. If he can’t die, then he must be playing a different game to what the mortal men are playing.
Cam: I mean, well, let’s just ask that question now. I mean, do you think the judge is supernatural, or was he a man? He’s just like a man.
What makes the Kid different?
Rich: What we’ve been skirting around is whether there’s something different or special about the kid, and why it is that the judge seems to find the kid particularly disagreeable to his worldview. “You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen. Only each was called upon to empty out his heart into the common, and one did not.” And we’ve talked before about how the judge was saying even the idiot did his part, but you did not.
Rich: I just am not convinced that the kid is that different. I find the judge’s fixation on him very peculiar, and I don’t think the textual evidence backs it up very well, because there are lots of others who openly question the judge’s philosophy and who call him crazy. Davy Brown calls him crazy. The ex-priest says, I won’t —
Benny: Toadvine puts a gun to his head at one point.
Rich: Exactly. Toadvine’s distinctly uncomfortable at various points. How do you guys square that circle? I don’t see the kid as being that different. I also don’t think the kid is a good person — I think he’s a terrible person, and we just have tiny little glimmers of something like the possibility to be not terrible.
Benny: I mean, we’re not privy to the relationship between Toadvine and the judge in the same way as we are to the relationship between the judge and the kid, right? Which is the focus of especially the latter part of the book. It’s possible the judge is having these confrontations with a lot of the characters. And in fact, we know at some point he was chasing —
Rich: No, because he’s saying, “you alone.” He keeps saying, “you alone, you alone.” He keeps singling out the kid as being different. Or do you mean that he’s lying?
Benny: He might be doing this with multiple characters, right? Yeah, he might be lying. He might just — this might be how he manipulates people in the world. He chases down everyone who he senses is not fully on board with his evil and then kills them.
Rich: I don’t like that. If that’s true, it really kills the narrative tension of the book.
Cam: I mean, the kid does seem better than most gang members, right? In a relative sense. Like, yeah, you could maybe argue Tobin and Tobin — sorry, Tobin and Toadvine — are similar. But Tobin’s set up against the judge. They’re almost like angel and devil at one point. Tobin saying, like, kill the judge — this is your one chance to do it. And then the judge is like, no, don’t do it, sell me your pistol.
Rich: So, after the gang has been dissipated and they’re meeting up at a watering hole in the desert, and there’s very few guns and very little supplies to go around, and it’s all like one man against another — yeah, the priest whispers to the kid when the judge joins him at the watering hole, like, kill him, kill him, or your life is forfeit. Which is amazing foreshadowing, because it turns out to be true. But also, usually the judge likes to say the priest never lies, but on this exact occasion he says, oh, the priest, you’ve had too much, son, you’re talking nonsense, your brain’s addled. When the priest tells the kid to kill him, and then like a couple of pages later someone else is like, the priest never lies. It just really nicely sets up that the kid has actually signed his own death warrant in his refusal to take action at that moment.
Rich: So this is —
Cam: Now we talk about it — I wonder if this is the textual evidence. Like, the kid is refusing the judge’s frame here. That violence is everything. Because I’m choosing not to kill the judge, right? Which is, I think, potentially like a dumbass decision.
Rich: And crucially, he would have had to kill him in cold blood, because this is when everyone knows that the judge will fuck anyone over if he needs to. But technically the kid would have to gun him down while he’s pretending to offer him money for the gun and pretending to be still part of the gang. So that makes the rejection harder than it —
Cam: I think that’s what pissed the judge off the most. You didn’t kill me and you walked away. You can’t escape this inevitability of violence and wrath. And he’s super peeved.
Benny: And that explains why Tobin escapes his wrath in some sense, because Tobin has bought into that frame. Tobin is telling him, okay, violence here is the only option, you do have to kill him, you have to engage in this behaviour. And so in some sense, the judge has won that part of Tobin’s mind over, where he says, yeah, violence is the only option. But the kid, by abstaining, is thwarting his view here.
Cam: But Toadvine and David Brown, the two other survivors — I don’t think they were killed by the judge in the end. You’re led to believe they may have been —
Benny: Aren’t they on —
Cam: But you see them later and they were hung, right?
Benny: Yeah.
Rich: But they were presumably robbed of their stuff, because the judge rides into town wearing their clothes —
Cam: Yeah, because he’s got their clothes.
Rich: — which are split at the seams.
Cam: And his $100 hat.
Benny: Way too small. Way too small.
Rich: And he’s got both of their guns. But Toadvine never had the courage to resist the judge’s charisma. He disagrees with him, but can’t bring himself to actually resist. So he levels the gun at his head and then the judge is like, shoot me or put it down. And he puts it down.
Benny: Oh, and maybe contradicting myself a bit earlier — maybe it’s that Toadvine, even though he didn’t shoot him, he again, like Tobin the ex-priest, still buys into violence might be the only solution here. He threatens the judge with violence, somewhat playing his own game. Whereas the kid was always just somewhat more reserved, trying to find — again, not all the time, but in some ways trying to find his third path.
Rich: Yeah, that’s true. We’re on to something here, I think, boys. We got a real distinguishing feature for the kid, which I was not really satisfied with before. But it is curious that the kid gets two more shots at the judge, right — albeit not guaranteed. Once the kid and the judge are stalking each other through the scrub in the desert, the judge passes across his gun sights twice, and the kid doesn’t take the shot, even though it’s now no longer exactly in cold blood. He kills the horses instead.
Cam: Is that when he kills the horses? I think Tobin’s like, aim for the horses. I almost felt like —
Rich: Yeah, maybe that’s even a biblical thing — you know, like thrice denying. He thrice refuses to take the violent option. I think that was probably significant.
Benny: But he does shoot at him early on. He does shoot at him once, right?
Rich: Yeah.
Cam: Well, the judge misses the kid as well. There’s one point he hits his reflection or something. I might be misremembering, but I thought that felt a little bit symbolic.
Rich: When he’s drinking at the watering hole.
Benny: Yeah, there’s some sand spray or something, yeah.
Cam: Because reflections pop up a few times. I think at one point the kid can’t see his reflection because it’s a bit misty or foggy. And I wondered — would the judge have missed? The judge is a beast. You kind of like — it feels like it breaks character, the judge missing. And then I wonder if the judge intentionally shot the reflection, and there was this symbolic view of killing the kid’s soul or some shit. I’d have to reread it.
Rich: True. Sorry, whenever you say “or some shit” it cracks me up.
Benny: Makes an excellent point, followed up by “or some shit.”
Cam: It just reminded me — the judge was wearing their clothes, but at one point he offers Toadvine money for Toadvine’s shitty hat, and he’s offering way more than it’s worth, like 100 bucks, which is probably like 5,000 dollars these days. And earlier on, when he buys some random puppies — which is kind of this odd behaviour, that he throws off a bridge — but it’s also said he pays way more than is needed for what the puppies are worth. And, I don’t know, he’s fucking around with coins, you know, he’s doing magic tricks with coins at the fire when they come back to him. And then the kid later on has this dream, when he’s in delirium, of coins being minted with the judge’s face and being used for currency. So they’re taking on a symbolic meaning.
Cam: But I first want to make the more prosaic point — this is the judge’s manipulative skills. He ultimately doesn’t really care about money, I think. It’s just an ends for him. He cares about violence, and it’s just this one thing he can leverage. Like, I can pay thousands of modern dollars just for this shitty hat, just to get one over on Toadvine. And then he’s offering big money for the kid’s pistol. And contrast to Glanton — Glanton is quite motivated by financial rewards for the scalps money and then taking over the ferry.
Rich: So that’s not clear to me — I was going to ask you guys about this. In one sense, yes, he’s got a chest bursting with treasures and stuff. But in another sense, I don’t know — there seems to be no endgame, and he still lives in like a clay mud, like a mud-wall room. He doesn’t have any other — okay, another illustrative point which was fascinating is that I feel like they like money purely instrumentally, which towards some other aim of violence or power. Because Davy Brown — there’s that amazing scene where he goes to the village and he’s got this beautiful hunting shotgun that he has presumably stolen off some ferry passenger. It’s inlaid with gold, maybe some antique. And he takes it to the blacksmith and tells him to file the barrels down so that he can have a sawn-off shotgun. And the blacksmith is like, no, I’m not going to desecrate that beautiful piece of art. And he just does it himself. He just hacks the barrels off. He doesn’t give a shit about the aesthetic value or the monetary value of this piece of beautiful craftsmanship. He only cares about it insofar as its ability to deal out violence, right? I thought that was interesting. And it feels reflective of Glanton as well. He just has this chest — it says he never counts the money or anything, he just stuffs it in there habitually. And the only way that they’re wielding their power is, they have slaves and stuff. Like sex slaves, basically, as well as some labourers building up the fortifications for them. It’s not super obvious that they are motivated by money.
Cam: Yeah, I mean, I wonder if at first like a lot of the gang members, including Glanton, that’s what they’re motivated by — like Glanton seems to want to get to California, and he charges — he changes the ferry fee by 4x, like it goes from one dollar to four dollars. But the judge himself, it just doesn’t seem at all what he’s about. I think Glanton maybe got corrupted by violence. There are points where he just seems to want violence for violence’s sake. It’s not about the money. He’s in one of those towns and he’s desecrating the Mexican flag, and he just wants to kick some shit off. And then later on, I think they kill people and they take scalps at that point — no one’s buying the scalps. It’s superfluous. They just want to do it. It’s corrupted him.
Greed, exploitation, and the end of the Wild West
Rich: That links quite nicely into the next section, actually, which is about the slaughter of the buffalo. Because again, it’s like this emblem of — maybe the real criticism here is, they do like money, but they are mindlessly accumulating it in a totally unsustainable way. Where, in the case of the ferry gang, they ratchet up the prices until essentially they get massacred.
Cam: And they do that in every town, right? Every town, they overstay their welcome. Could have been quite a good deal with the scalps, and they move on to the next town and do that.
Rich: Yeah. Glanton runs out of country. That’s it, right? So with the buffalo, this is a big time jump into the future where the kid has become the man. Do you know how many years it is? Maybe like 20 years or something.
Cam: It’s 1878, I think. So it’s like 30 — almost 30 years. And it skips over the Civil War.
Benny: 30 years roughly, because it was ‘49, I think.
Rich: Oh shit. So the kid’s probably in his 50s, or in his 40s?
Benny: In his 40s, I think.
Rich: So he comes across this old buffalo hunter, and the buffalo hunter is spinning yarns about how things were when they came through and basically wholesale slaughtered all of the buffalo in North America, pegging their skins out by the acre. Eventually they go on one final hunt, and they find exactly eight animals — there’s one herd left — and then they kill them as well, which is kind of bleak. He says, every one of them that God ever made is gone, as if they’d never been at all.
Rich: I mean, probably Americans know this stuff, but I checked on what actually happened. And yeah, basically between the 1860s and 1880s, bison almost went extinct. It went from 30 to 60 million buffalo to literally a few hundred. It was right on the brink of extinction. Killing on a scale that’s hard to conceptualize. Acres of skins spread out — they just would take the skins and maybe just the skin, and then they just leave everything else to rot. So you just get these graveyards of bones and stinking meat everywhere across some huge swath of America.
Cam: Yeah, I definitely think that’s kind of a metaphor for that. And this depletion of things. I mean, I think of the final — the epilogue, right — is a bit confusing. There’s this half-page thing and it seems to be this man just making holes. And like Rich said, the buffalo have been wiped out. But I think he’s making a fence. When you look in the history of it — like, barbed wire was kind of made in the 70s and then just totally took on, and was everywhere. And suddenly you had fences everywhere. But before this, actually, you didn’t have fences, which is kind of crazy, right? Someone else online pointed this out. When you think about it, the gang never runs into fences. But it’s this thing where, there’s no containment of the gang, and they can just go city to city. As you can see, all these buffalo wiped out — but 30 years fast forward, it’s kind of the end of the Wild West in a sense, symbolically. We suddenly have fences everywhere, things are more contained now, laws and institutions and stuff. So I think that was kind of the point of it — this wild west is over somewhat.
Rich: I think that’s right. The buffalo symbolize that as well. And it’s linked in with this idea of manifest destiny, which is basically another idealization of might-is-right, where you have to impose superior Western or American values and civilization upon the untamed West, and in doing so you can become rich and claim your — you know, what is owed to you. There’s this untold bounty waiting there for deserving pilgrims. And the reality is, of course, that you’ll just wring it dry and destroy everything through greed. And of course, there’s no unlimited bounty — for one thing, some of it belongs to other people, but for another, it is a finite resource that will be exhausted. And if you do it in a thoughtless way, then you just end up with — I don’t know how much surplus you capture at all.
Rich: I think Tyler Cowen actually argues that the westward expansion of the United States was one of the big drivers of wealth increase and productivity growth, but it was a one-time thing. You get a one-time boost and then it’s over. That’s from a very neutral economist hat talking. I’m sure other people have different opinions about it.
Cam: Well, if you look at those maps of the Mississippi River Basin and just like, firing out their whole heartland of America, you can see why. It’s just a total boon, capturing all their land.
Rich: Yeah, but I think the idea is that it’s not a carefully thought-through philosophy. It’s just a justification to do what you wanted to do anyway, and to put it under the veneer of civilizing the savages or bringing all of this land under the flag of American capitalism and American governance. Kind of like the Captain White character right at the start — a similar kind of nice-sounding veneer to disguise what your real motives are.
Cam: All right. And then, I mean, we’re getting here — we meet these bone pickers. Rich, do you want to —
The Bonepickers: the cycle of violence repeats
Rich: Yeah, there’s huge piles of bones everywhere because of all the dead buffalo. And I guess now the industry has switched to some low-value commodity where people come and cart away the bones, and maybe they make them into fertilizer or glue or something. But there’s all these roaming bone carts, and the man at this point is riding through this country, the country of bones. And he makes his camp and he meets these teenagers who come up and they’re questioning him about his past, and they’re asking him about Davy Brown’s necklace of ears that he wears around his neck, and they don’t believe him, basically, that he used to be an Indian scalper.
Cam: He’s got all these stories that no one believes.
Rich: Yeah, like, yeah, right, old man. But this is one teenager in particular who is 15 years old — which the man points out is the same age that he was when he first took a bullet — who is deliberately provoking the man and has to be sort of brought away by his friends. And then later that night this teenager comes back and basically tries to kill the man. He shoots at him in the darkness and the man shoots him dead. And it’s fascinating because there’s this real inevitability and fatalism to it. This real cycle of violence repeating — from when the kid was a 15-year-old when he took his bullet, to now he kills this 15-year-old boy. The man himself says, you wouldn’t have lived anyway. And then the teenager’s friends are also completely unsurprised. They come the next morning to take his body away and they say, I knew we’d bury him on this prairie. And they say this thing I caught, which I didn’t catch last time — his granddad was killed by a lunatic and buried in the woods like a dog. So that’s a callback to that story that the judge tells.
Benny: That story, yeah.
Cam: Oh, there you go. That’s the story. So this kid is the kid’s grandson — sorry, grandson of the guy.
Rich: Yeah.
Cam: Elrod, yeah, okay. And another callback as well, I think — when the kid is just talking to the bone pickers, and the kids are being hostile towards the man and talking about being short or something. Elrod says, “ain’t nobody done that yet,” or something like that. But I think that’s the exact line that the kid said way back when he meets Toadvine and has the bar fight with Toadvine. He hits him and it hurts his neck, and Toadvine says, I was trying to kill you. And the kid himself, who was 15 back then, says, ain’t nobody done that yet.
Rich: Oh, I knew that sounded familiar when I read that line.
Cam: So it does seem to be this — the kid who is now the man sees this new kid, Elrod, in the cycle of violence, which has this game-theoretic logic to it. You know, like the famous Hatfields and McCoys — you kill as revenge and that re-girl, and you set off the cycle. And in some sense, maybe the kid, who is now the man, ends it by killing Elrod sort of early.
Rich: Well, I think — I don’t think he ends it. I think he perpetuates it. It’s got more this mythical supernatural tinge to it, where the judge was telling that story about the guy who gets killed and has his bones buried in the woods. All the gang were piping up and saying, they’ve heard versions of that story, but he’s got it wrong, blah, blah, blah. And then this kid is literally, supposedly, related to this person from the story. And that story was about the inevitable cycle of violence — where you kill a man, and it leaves his remaining son, sets an example of violence for your son, leaves the orphan son subject to a violent life.
Rich: And then you see at the end, when the boy — what’s his name, the teenager?
Cam: Elrod.
Rich: Elrod. So Elrod himself leaves behind an orphan who relied on him, which is his little brother. And it’s quite poignant that it says he was so small that he couldn’t help to bear the body away — so his friends carry away Elrod’s brother. And then the little boy walks off carrying his dead brother’s gun. So the cycle has not been halted. The cycle continues. And now we’ve got another angry, violent young man forming. I found that passage very depressing, especially because it doesn’t match that well with how the kid is meant to be in some way a symbol of escaping the cycle of violence or not wanting to be a part of it.
Cam: Yeah, I mean, the kid, i.e. the protagonist, like he shoots Elrod kind of in self-defense, though. I think he’s kind of attacked by him. So this is kind of defensible on that — I think that’s right though, it kind of perpetuates the cycle of violence. But there’s — I’m not sure if I’m going to articulate this — but there’s something around the kid himself. He’s just lived this whole life, and it feels like he’s dealing with his past, with the Glanton gang and the judge who’s like out there, who literally was chasing him and is still kind of out there, and at least metaphorically seems to haunt him. He can’t escape that. And I think you can see that in these young bone pickers, right — they’re starting this cycle of violence, and this is going to haunt them and live with them. So when I said “ending it” then, I kind of meant that the kid himself hasn’t escaped it, and death is maybe the only escape. But I think you’re right, they’re pointing out that this kind of does instigate a perpetual cycle.
Rich: Or at least it’s that depressing McCarthy point that is just ever present. It’s not actually really about the kid — the kid is just there because he’s the protagonist through whom we look upon the world. And it’s not really his fault, he couldn’t really have done otherwise. But this is a good point, Cam. I think — just take us through the last big set piece of the kid finally meeting up with the judge again.
Cam: Yeah, well, I was wondering, Benny, did you want to have a go at that?
Benny: Yeah, it’s not great. I did want to make a brief point about what Rich just said, though, which hopefully he can still hear me. I think it’s a mistake to view the kid as this ultimate beacon of hope who always does the right thing. I think it’s more accurate to view him as someone who’s caught up in all the incentives going on around him, which are mostly pointed in the wrong and bad directions, as someone who can occasionally step outside that cycle a little bit and do something that is not that — at least other people around him have trouble doing, especially other members of the gang. So he’s not predisposed to wanton violence, but he still commits a lot of violence. And if we ran across him today, we probably wouldn’t think he was a good guy. So I don’t think there’s too much of a conflict with him shooting Elrod and being this person who can on occasion demonstrate some ability to restrain himself when it comes to bashing babies’ heads against walls or whatever.
Benny: It’s more like — the fact that he’s not one of the people doing that doesn’t mean he’s always and forever doing the right thing all the time, right? He’s still caught up in this giant system where all the incentives are fucked, where everyone is sort of on edge all the time, predisposed to killing someone who laughs at you in a saloon or whatever. And that’s still the world he’s engulfed in, right? And there’s no escaping that. There’s no escaping just the violent incentives that are around you all the time, even if sometimes he can restrain himself.
Cam: Yeah, I think that’s right. What’s interesting though, near the end, is there’s almost this feeling of like he’s been baptized or redeemed or something. Because he momentarily goes to prison, after the Yuma escape. The judge comes and visits him and fucks him over there, and that’s when he sort of says that the kid’s mutinous. And the judge doesn’t kill him, and lets him go. But then the kid just gets let out of prison by this priest, and I think literally gets baptized. And then, fast forward 30 years later, the kid’s traveling, you know, he’s traveling the whole of America doing odd jobs. He’s like a cowboy, but he’s traveling with a Bible around his neck, and he’s still illiterate so to speak. But it felt at least like he was trying to redeem himself or something like that. I’m not sure if he actually was.
Rich: Well, we don’t know what he’s been doing, but we can presume that he hasn’t been doing too much murder, right? Because we think that it would have caught up with him if he had — you know, that type of lifestyle does not bode well for anyone’s longevity.
Cam: Just drinking whiskey and telling stories.
Rich: Just getting in fights with everyone you meet.
Cam: Yeah, so let’s get into this final scene then. Did you want to have a go, Benny, or should I?
Benny: You can go ahead, my voice might give out.
Cam: Okay. So we’re fast forward into the future. The kid’s an adult. He travels to a saloon and there’s this dancing bear and young girl playing music, and everyone’s enjoying themselves and the alcohol. Someone in the crowd shoots the bear and things kick off. Oh, sorry, I’m not sure if I mentioned — the judge is at the saloon enjoying the bear dancing.
The last dance: Is the judge a supernatural being?
Rich: It’s the first time the kid and the judge have run into each other in 30 years.
Benny: And the judge seems not to have aged.
Cam: Exactly. The judge looks the same and he’s having a jolly old time.
Rich: He’s been on those Bryan Johnson protocols.
Cam: Anyway, the kid leaves out to an outhouse, and the judge is in there, and the judge is naked. And then it’s just mentioned, the judge grabs him, brings him in, almost embraces him. And then you don’t get a description of what happens, which is interesting — because we’ve just had 350 pages of detailed descriptions of brutal violence. But he leaves us out. This is offstage. And then we just get these strangers nearby urinating near it, and someone else wants to use the outhouse. Someone says — yeah, I always imagine it’s a joke when you finish the toilet — like, I wouldn’t go there in if I was you. But one of them goes in there and he’s just shocked at what he sees. And we don’t know what he’s seen.
Rich: What happens to the guy who goes in? Does he just say, oh, that was — like, does he throw up or something?
Benny: He says, good God almighty, I think. He just looks in and says good God almighty, and then backs out.
Cam: And then later on, I think the judge is back in the bar, enjoying and dancing. And he tells the reader, I will not die.
Rich: Read that last bit.
Cam: Do you have it handy, Rich? Sorry, I don’t —
Benny: Yeah, I can do it. So this is the very end. “Towering over them all is the judge, and he is naked and dancing, his small feet lively and quick, and now in double time, and bowing to the ladies. Huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die.” And then it goes on like that for a couple more sentences, and he just repeats, he never sleeps, he never dies. Which is horrifying.
Rich: Yeah, it’s so good. It’s such an iconic closing paragraph.
Benny: Yeah, it’s incredible. Also, just to give the reader — it’s true you don’t know what happens in the outhouse, but even the description of it as it happens is pretty horrifying. He says, “The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him” — meaning the man at this point — “gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden bar latch home behind him.” So he just engulfs this kid into the porta-potty and devours him or something — we’re not sure what happens in there, but something bad.
Cam: Well, yeah, so there are a few things to talk about. One of them is, what do we think happened?
Rich: Yeah, there are some different possibilities. The other element is that the bear — the dancing bear had a little girl as part of the act as well, and she was sobbing over the corpse of the bear, and then she can’t be found. People are out searching for her. So there’s another little loose thread there. We know the judge’s predilections and how he leaves like small children. So another possibility is, maybe the girl’s corpse is in there. I don’t know. What do you guys think — if the judge was in the act of killing the man, or doing something else? Presumably — I feel like you have to see the aftermath. They’re seeing the aftermath, right? The body of the man, I think, is probably the strongest bet, in some disgusting pose, or in the toilet itself, or horribly disfigured or something like that.
Cam: I like McCarthy’s decision to not show it. Aside from the ambiguity of what happened — even if it wasn’t ambiguous, I like how he didn’t show it, because you’re kind of like, man, how bad would that have been if we’d just — we’ve had dead babies hanging from trees and scalped feet and axes through the mouth. The only other thing left offstage is the kids that go missing throughout the book. Often we’re not actually shown what happened to them.
Rich: We never know who did what, right? But it’s just very strongly implied.
Cam: Yeah, exactly.
Rich: Circumstantially, it was almost certainly the judge.
Benny: Yeah, I’m not sure if what literally happened to the kid is that important for the moral of the story, which I take to be something like, ultimately, the kid didn’t win. You know, whatever the judge was — whether he was this Gnostic Demiurge or Antichrist or just the evil westward expansion or whatever it was — he ultimately couldn’t win over whatever the judge represented. And so the specifics of it — whether he died, or how he died, or —
Cam: Whether he was ass-raped or death.
Benny: Whether he became the judge.
Cam: Doesn’t matter.
Benny: Yeah, exactly. The very brutal specifics of whatever actually happened in the outhouse, I don’t think that actually matters as much.
Cam: Yeah, you’re right. We’re led to believe he loses, and we’re led to believe it’s pretty brutal and horrifying. I mean, I think there are some other interpretations out there — like, we don’t even know if the judge killed the kid in there. I don’t like those. I feel like —
Rich: We just wanted to give him a hug.
Cam: Yeah, exactly. I feel like, it’s starting like the early 2000s, it was always like plot-hole culture and pointing them out, or different endings. And they have all these theories. I just feel people get a bit too caught up in them, of like, yeah, it wasn’t actually the judge, and maybe at the end it was the kid who was there and not the judge. I suppose there is a metaphorical reading that the kid has become the judge. So if we take the judge’s words that you read out before — like, I am not dead, like, I live in others. I live in the kid. I live in Elrod. This evilness or this violence lives elsewhere. And maybe the kid did something horrible. There are other readings. I don’t love those, because I think it’s pretty obviously suggested the judge fucked the kid up.
Benny: But I mean, even if that’s true, I guess that’s my point, right? Like, it doesn’t change the fact that whatever the judge represented won this battle at the end, right?
Cam: The kid would still lose. Yeah, if the kid’s become the judge.
Rich: Yeah, I agree that it’s fine to be ambiguous. I think Cormac did the right thing doing that. And it’s also similar to what he’s done with the character of the judge as a whole, where he leaves him fairly open to interpretation. And I think that ties back to what we talked about a little bit last time, of the self-mythologizing that he’s doing there. He’s written this incredible antagonist in such an artful way that he will live on in all of our minds and in the literary canon, I think, to some degree, because you can’t neatly pin him down to say, he is this, he is that. We don’t even really know if he’s a man or if he’s a supernatural being. So I think it’s strategic ambiguity, which enriches the story and enriches McCarthy’s goals of wanting to enter the literary canon. To have the chutzpah to have your character say, I will never die, I can never die, I’m gonna go on and on — and it’s like, yeah, that’s exactly what happened.
Cam: Yeah, that’s nice. You can take it a little bit. And just on your point, there’s gnostic readings, like the judge as demiurge, or maybe not as a demiurge but as one of the angel — the archon things. Or the judge as the whale or something from maybe Dirk — or another character from that. There are these parallels there, but I think you’re right that you can’t quite neatly package them. It’s not like there’s one-to-one correspondence. The judge is more than that. The judge is influenced by these literary figures, but it’s kind of his own thing that’s hard to completely package.
Cam: Yeah, and there’s this question of, is he supernatural, right? You were sort of saying before, Rich, you think he probably is?
Rich: Yeah, I mean, come on, for all intents and purposes, yes. But you can’t say 100% yes, right?
Cam: Yeah, so if we’re to be nerds in our catalog, I suppose there’s this thing that Benny just said, like he looks like he hasn’t aged over 30 years. And maybe he just looks good for a bald baby-face guy. He also seems to have supernatural strength — he lifts these boulders, and everyone’s surprised by it. I mean, the craziest thing —
Rich: No, that’s not supernatural, though. It’s still within the realms of plausibility. It’s never like he lifted a house or something. He lifted a big rock. It’s possible to lift a big rock.
Cam: I suppose the other thing was him sitting in the desert — that’s when they stumbled across him, right? But again, it’s possible. And he makes gunpowder.
Rich: It’s perfectly on the edge of plausibility, right? It could technically happen.
Cam: But I suppose the other bit of textual evidence, which is on the edge, is, he seems to just pop up everywhere. Every gang member has said they’ve seen the judge before they met him. He’s always popping up.
Benny: Learning Dutch from like a day, I think, like literally a day with a Dutchman, is that right? Or a week or something. He knows all these languages, he knows how to dance.
Cam: That does seem like supernatural shit.
Benny: He knows about everything. This guy.
Cam: That’s what puts you over there, Jay. And he dances with a strange position.
Benny: It’s funny, normally I’m on the side of really wanting to figure out what the author intended with these sort of characters. For Holden, I feel like somehow it doesn’t matter, again, for the purposes of what McCarthy was trying to convey. Like, regardless of whether he was just a man or like a supernatural demiurge, somehow what he represented — this will to power, übermensch kind of guy, might-makes-right — I think you can still have all these conversations and they remain intact regardless of whether he was supernatural or not. So I don’t know, I’m sort of tempted with this book to just say, like, it really doesn’t matter. Focusing too much on it draws your attention away from what was actually interesting and important and going on. So that’s at least my initial thought. Somehow it feels wrong to focus on exactly the supernatural status of the judge.
Rich: 100%. Like, if you read this book and the main thing you want to litigate is exactly whether or not he’s a demon or whatever, I think you’ve completely missed all of the interesting stuff in this book. The judge’s philosophy and his ideas are fascinating. And as you say, it doesn’t particularly matter who is voicing them — the type of being that is voicing them. He embodies a certain philosophy and a certain set of ideas which is fascinating. And I just think it adds richness to put him in the canon of drawing upon Milton’s Satan and obsession with freedom at all costs and not being constrained by convention. And then adding, I don’t know if he added in some Gnostic stuff or whether that’s just more of an accident that it came out that way, but I think it enriches it nicely without needing to be the main thing. It’s secondary. I don’t care at all the answer to this question. I’m just fascinated by what the judge embodies.
Benny: Nice, yeah, yeah.
Cam: Well, and then you’ve got his name, right? His name is Judge. And at one point the kid asks Tobin, like, what is he the judge of? And Tobin’s like, shush, shush, like, he might hear you. This kind of poses to the readers, like, what is he the judge of? He talks about law a lot — he cites Coke and Blackstone, the founders of common law, to get them out of a bind because there were no witnesses and therefore it sort of didn’t happen, was his point. Do you have any thoughts on what he’s a judge of? Judge of man, mankind, judge of violence, judge of reality that he wants to control? I mean, he certainly seems to have this judgment of the kid, right — like, he views the kid as defecting and failing the gang by showing mercy. Not playing his game of what he views as important in reality.
Rich: It’s maybe the only time he’s judgmental. He’s a very non-judgmental judge.
Benny: Wait, I don’t know — do you think that’s true? Like, he seems to have strong moral views.
Cam: The non-judge.
Benny: You know, despite them being what we might call immoral, he seems to judge —
Cam: Humanity is weak as well.
Benny: Yeah, like he seems to hold people in judgment of, like — as we were saying earlier — whether they act ultimately free, or whether they’re bound by some sort of, no doubt what he would view as, slave morality. He’s judging the kid, you know, he seems to be judging members of Glanton’s gang. But that being said, there is an interesting amorality about him as well. He does seem to not care about a lot of individuals. But maybe that’s because he feels like they’ve adopted his will-to-power type views already or something. Yeah, I don’t know. I’m realizing as I’m talking about it, I’m confused, actually.
Rich: Was there something in the dream where he talks about what he’s a judge of? I didn’t put the dream on the docket because I couldn’t make any sense of it — the dream where he’s counterfeiting coins with his face on it.
Cam: I wonder, now I’m thinking about that — I wonder if there’s something around — because what’s the judge doing a lot of the time? He’s writing things down, he’s storing his knowledge, he’s representing reality. And then this dream — what’s happening in the dream? It’s like he’s dreaming of these coins that have the judge put on them. And he wants to be fake coins. Yeah, I don’t know — just something around an ersatz reality, or a fake reality. Like the map and the territory. The judge is making this map, and these coins are potentially going to be used. And this whole story, right, is kind of that as well. That’s what we now know West Texas and North Mexico from — the story, which is this representation. I don’t know.
Rich: Let’s give Benny last comments because he’s got to go right now.
Benny: No, those sort of were my last comments. I don’t know if I have anything more to add.
Rich: But we’re going to talk about — I’d like to hear what you guys thought about McCarthy and reflections and stuff. I guess we don’t have time for that, so maybe don’t worry about it.
Cam: Could give a quick yay and a nay, Benny?
Summing up and last-minute token criticism
Benny: Yeah, we can try and do that quick, I guess. This is the first McCarthy I read, so I’m heavily bought in and would be keen to read some of his other work. I really don’t know that much about him as an author, to be honest, aside to the flirtation with Gnosticism that I mentioned last time. But other than that —
Cam: He had a few other flirtations in his life.
Benny: Yeah, I know he was married a few times, right? But yeah, other than that, I don’t know much about him. So I don’t know if his other work is tinged with the same themes or set in the same time and place.
Cam: Well, have you seen No Country?
Benny: Like, I don’t know, honestly, anything about it.
Cam: This is kind of a similar character.
Benny: No, I’ve never even seen the movie, to be honest.
Cam: Yeah.
Benny: I’ve never seen it. Which maybe I should watch it. Or maybe I shouldn’t. But that’s also Western style, right?
Rich: Watch the movie.
Benny: That’s like —
Rich: It’s better than the book. Perfect movie. No notes.
Benny: Oh, really? Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Should we do more McCarthy? Are you guys interested in doing more?
Cam: Yeah, I’d be happy to do No Country. I’d be happy to do All the Pretty Horses. Be happy to do his recent ones, yeah.
Rich: Yeah, there’s definitely more to say. It’s thematically similar to this book. And he’s not actually a huge ideas guy. I don’t think he’s got — like, he’s got a few ideas that he hammers. So we could definitely figure out a way to do more, put it that way. But it might not be as novel and fresh as this. There’s heaps that we’ve hardly talked about, like the writing style, the literary techniques, which are pretty controversial. So there’s so much more that we could dig into just around the actual writing.
Cam: Well, it sounds like Benny’s got to go. I mean, we could —
Rich: Yeah, we’ll say goodbye to Benny and then we can just keep going, wrap things up. Cam — okay, let’s go back to the epilogue. So we’ve got the man progressing over the plain and he is making holes. He’s striking some fire in the holes, and he’s drawing this line of holes before him to the edge of something. And then there are people following behind him — like wanderers in search of bones, and wanderers not in search of bones. So your interpretation from earlier is that he is building a fence, and perhaps it’s like he’s fencing off to the edge of the west and they’re running out of country. What else could we get from this? What is Cormac McCarthy trying to do with this book? Not talking about any specific plot element, but I assume that the epilogue is kind of a coda that maybe gives us clues as to his overall ambition or point. Because a lot of people think it’s a nihilistic book, and I can definitely see that, but I’m not sure if it’s meant to be totally nihilistic.
Rich: So I guess the question at the centre of it is, is he in fact deterministic about all this stuff? That’s really what I’m wondering. Because it is descriptively true up to a point — like, it’s obviously heavily embellished and selective about what it chooses to portray. But do you think he is deterministic? There’s definitely some determinism in this epilogue, and there’s heaps of general fatalistic stuff throughout the book. Or is he ultimately somewhat hopeful?
Cam: Well, he struggles through mercy. Yeah. And then he also — the other big thing is the kid’s unwillingness to engage with the worst of it, or the judge’s game. There seems to be this kind of free will aspect there to the kid. Even though there also seems to be this fatalistic aspect, you know, and fatalism is sprinkled throughout the book, and the narrator predicts things that are going to happen. And there is this question that the kid can’t escape it as well. He’s just lived 30 years, trying to escape it, but he can’t escape the judge’s shadow, and then literally runs into the judge. So yeah, I think he’s dealing with that paradox, both somewhat. I don’t know. What do you think?
Rich: I don’t know. I mean, again, it’s probably the almost strategic ambiguity of not giving a clear answer to it.
Cam: Yeah, and this other thing that we haven’t talked about is this dance, right? This final scene — we have this dancing bear, and this is like the third or fourth bear we’ve seen in the book, and this one’s dancing. And then the judge goes on to one of his many lectures, and this time it’s around dancing. The judge explicitly says that he views dancing as a ritual. There’s this ritualistic component, and he says any ritual worth its salt needs bloodletting.
Cam: You know, I think we’ve both read this — there’s a good essay by Sarah Perry around rituals. She makes the case that rituals need some form of sacrifice. At the very least that sacrifice is like time — your own time — but it needs this costly signal, and its purpose often is for binding groups together. Costly signal and the sacrifice that binds you together. I think there’s empirical evidence that religious groups that do rituals have more longevity. Without the religious aspect, rituals don’t help, which means you kind of need this perhaps supernatural aspect to do it as well. But I think the judge is right that rituals need some form of sacrifice — might not be bloodlust.
Cam: Aside from that, within the book, dancing seems to be this harbinger of violence to come. It often foreshadows it. Even early on with the magicians, Black Jackson is dancing with them, and then he murders White Jackson shortly after. And when Glanton’s gang is going to all these Chihuahuan city towns, they get drunk and they eat and they all start dancing, and then shortly follows the violence and mayhem. The idiot dances at one point, described with great gravity, showing that even though the idiot can’t do much, he can dance. That’s interesting. And of course, the judge dances several times and is described as a very good dancer.
Cam: So it certainly seems to predict the violence that comes. There’s something about — I used the word carnal again — I think the judge maybe respects the animalistic nature of it. I mean, dancers have been — there’s literally war dances.
Rich: Yeah, you may have very, very occasionally been treated to the New Zealand indigenous war dance, the haka, which is only brought out on extremely special occasions.
Cam: Yeah, I don’t know — now I’m just trying to think of human nature, of why I would have done.
Rich: Hey, is that why the haka sucks? Is because there’s no cost associated with it now? Before it was like, we’re going to fight you, someone’s going to die today. And now there’s no costly signal at all, it’s just pure bluster.
Cam: Yeah, I mean, the haka is a little bit oversaturated. I don’t think it’s lost all its status, all its mana. It can still get you rocked up at the start of a rugby game.
Rich: Let’s say at the start of a soccer game or a basketball game.
Cam: Basketball game, when they’re going to lose 50 points to LeBron James and friends. Yeah, I don’t know. I think there’s this thing around rituals, right — you have this ritual of the gang, and it binds you together. I don’t quite know anything more apart from it just being kind of the symbol of violence to come. Do you have any thoughts?
Rich: Yeah, I can’t put it together either. Like, you’re right that dance comes up a lot, and then the final passage is really all about the dance, but I don’t really know what to do with that. My brain is pretty fried as well. Maybe something will come to me later.
Cam: We’ll have a dream. The dancing bear.
Rich: Yeah, I don’t know. Why is he dancing? Why is the judge interested in dancing music? I have to ask ChatGPT. Wait, should I? I’m gonna ask him live. I asked ChatGPT live.
Rich: All right, so Chat says it’s about control. In that he’s not just participating in the dance — he orchestrates it. It sort of imposes his own order upon the world, dictating the rhythm and movement. So, yeah, I think that is true. Often he’ll take up the instrument of the band even, or he’ll force the musicians to play a tune, or he’ll grab the violin out of their hand and play his own jig, I guess, right? It would be interesting to look at all the instances of dancing and see how often is he dancing to someone else’s music and how often is it his music. Like maybe it’s always his music. It’s always like a band that he’s commissioned.
Cam: It’s like when you’ve had eight beers and you’re just like taking over someone’s Spotify, just that song you like — really want to spend, a bit obnoxious.
Rich: Yeah, exactly. Chat also says it ties into the pagan — like it’s echoes of the revelries and pagan rituals, another very deep ancient cultural practice that is exaltatory.
Cam: Yeah, okay. So we could tie things up — your thoughts on his writing style and stuff.
Rich: Yeah, I think it’s honestly a wonderful book. It’s really fucking good. It just deserves its status, but we haven’t criticized it at all. So maybe if we do other McCarthy books, we could try and be a bit more critical, because I do have some minor criticisms which I don’t want to do right now. But, I mean, in the interests of being critical thinkers, and also — no, I don’t know, there’s no need to be a hater, actually. Who cares, man, my brain’s just not working. We’re gonna wrap this thing up.
Cam: Yeah, I know you’re fried, but I’m kind of interested in your criticisms now.
Rich: Oh, should I quickly do a criticism then?
Cam: Yeah, we’ll just at least say them.
Rich: Well, I think we’re really working hard groping around trying to figure out the meaning, say, of the dancing — we got kind of hung up on that. I honestly think that he is not necessarily ascribing significance to every single thing, and that we are chasing our own tails if we’re looking for it. And I also think his writing is so great — it’s interesting because it’s basically poetry, which I’m not a huge poetry fan, and it just perfectly runs up against the border of being pretentious or purple prose, and for me it never quite crosses over to actually being purple prose. But I can see it’s getting so close. And if you look too closely at any given sentence, some of the sentences just don’t actually make any sense, right? They sound cool, but they don’t mean anything.
Cam: Yeah, like grammatically, right?
Rich: So I think if you went on a sentence-by-sentence analysis, I think you’d find a lot of cool-sounding sentences where he’s played with the syntax in interesting ways or used vocabulary in interesting ways, which don’t actually really mean anything. And the way that I read this is just to keep moving along and not try and think too hard about any given line, and just take in the overall vibe and atmosphere. And I love it. For some reason, I love to just be swept along in it. But if you stop, if you get too picky, I think his writing will actually fall apart a little bit. I think he’s trying a bit too hard.
Cam: As well, like maybe you should just be more impressionistic about it and sort of let it hit you, and this mood and this feeling of the judge — rather than trying to dig too deep into his philosophy.
Rich: I think so. I do think that’s true. And I think it’s especially true of some of his other books. Like maybe less so this one, because we’ve certainly found heaps of stuff to talk about. But his work as a whole, it honestly just has — it’s a vibe. It’s more of a vibe, really. He hits the same notes over and over. And if you like the vibe, if you like the impression, then you’ll enjoy it. But I’m not sure if he comes out with anything — if he has any particularly brilliant insights. It’s more that he is a master impressionist, as you put it.
Cam: Yeah, and it gets really close. You can see it going wrong, right? You can see it being pretentious. It is an interesting thing, like how you get away with it and how you succeed. Because it can be a fine line. But yeah, I don’t have too much more to add, I think.
Rich: Let’s leave it there. And we’ll — I think we’re going to do The Odyssey next, so obviously everyone knows what that is. Some continuation maybe of like morality, Bronze Age morality, will be interesting — of the Homeric heroes. I think it’ll be a quite natural extension of this, actually, so that should be fun.
Cam: Yeah, having a journey. Yeah, we can talk how this is.
Rich: Oh yeah, and of course we love getting mail. Please email us, douevenlit@gmail.com — that’s just the letter U, not the word. And let us know — I mean, especially I’d love to hear anyone else’s Blood Meridian analysis. If you have things that you thought we’re wrong about or points that we missed or interpretations that you want to put forward, I would really like to hear from anyone. So write us in at that email address, and other than that, see you next time. Bye.
