The Judge's Molar: Infanticide and the Meteorite in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

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Notes

¹For close critical analyses of the Judge's brutal and sinister method of claiming and appropriation, see Wallach 125–35 and Masters 25–37.

²The insistent, ominous motif of the Judge's smile occurs, among its many other instances, at 15, 83, 89, 97, 99, 122, 208, 229, 240, 296, 318, 319, 320, 340, and 347.

³Steven Shaviro extends this theory further to include all of Glanton's gang: “Glanton and his men […] have no spirit of seriousness or of enterprise; they unwittingly pursue self-ruin rather than advantage. All these men—and not just the kid—are childlike in their unconsciousness, or indifference, as to motivations and consequences” (154).

⁴The Authorized Version of 1611, derived from The Precise Parallel New Testament 98 and 100.

⁵ Nova Vulgata 1804–05.

⁶Like the Judge, McCarthy can quote Scripture, too. Responding in a recent interview to a question about his Irish Catholic upbringing, McCarthy stated, “I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it's meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the [Sante Fe] Institute. They're just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, ‘It's really more important to be good than it is to be smart.’ And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you” (“America's Favorite Cowboy”).