“THE FOOL. SHOOT THE FOOL”: ABILITY, SUPER-ABILITY, AND DISABILITY IN CORMAC

MCCARTHY’S BLOOD MERIDIAN

A Thesis

Presented to

The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

Mitchell Wiler Ploskonka

May, 2016 “THE FOOL. SHOOT THE FOOL”: ABILITY, SUPER-ABILITY, AND DISABILITY IN CORMAC

MCCARTHY’S BLOOD MERIDIAN

Mitchell Ploskonka

Thesis

Accepted: Approved:

Advisor Interim Dean of the College Dr. Hillary Nunn Dr. John Green

Faculty Reader Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Amanda Booher Dr. Chand Midha

Faculty Reader Date Dr. Joseph Ceccio

Interim Department Chair Dr. Sheldon Wrice ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS A CORPOREAL MCCARTHY………………………..……………..1

Bloody Philosophy: A Review of Scholarship………………………………..….……… 2

A Move to Corporeality: Disability Studies………………………………..……...…13 Chapters: The Purgatory of Able-Bodies, the Rhetoric of Super-Ability, and James Roberts…………………………………………………………………………….…….…..17

II. “THEY RODE ON”: DEFINING ABILITY, THE PURGATORY OF DISABILITY, AND ESTABLISHING A GAZE…………………………………………………………………………….…………22

The Ability to Disable: Defining Disability………………………………………...... 22

Disability in Civilization and on the Frontier……………………………….………….29

Purgatory of Fallen Bodies……………………………………………………….……….……32

Looking Back: The kid’s Soft Spot for Disability………………………………………34

III. “INVERSIONS WITHOUT END”: THE JUDGE AS HEPHAESTUS AND MALIGNANT MĒTIS………………………………………………………………………………………………………….45

“What’s he a judge of?”: Comparisons to the Judge and His Body…………46

The Disabled God: Hephaestus and Mētis……………………………………………...51

“The thread of order”: The judge as Mētis Rhetorician…………………..….... 54

IV. “SEE THE WILD MAN TWO BITS”: JAMES ROBERTS, IDIOCY, AND PERSONHOOD……………………………………………………………………………………….…..….….63

iii “I think he was an imbecile”: James Roberts and the History of American Idiocy………………………………….…………………………………………………..…….…….…....64

“What do you figure to do with that thing?”: James Roberts and Literary Idiocy…………………………………………………………………………………………………….……71

“Among its fellows”: Defining Personhood…………………………….…………..………82

V. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………………………...………...86

WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………………………….…..……………95

iv CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION: TOWARDS A COPOREAL MCCARTHY

Blood Meridian is, at its most basic, a novel about bodies. The goal of Glanton and his gang is to locate and scalp Native Americans for monetary profit. Indeed, the

central concern of the novel is how to disable another's body without suffering a personal disability. It is a testament to Cormac McCarthy’s triumphant prose that the novel takes on myriad other concerns, from philosophy to archeology, cosmology to geology. In the whirlwind of scholarship tasked with confronting these concerns, the

body has taken a passenger seat; it has become a secondary player in a higher critical

performance, mission even, one that values the abstract over the physical. Yet the body

is the mover in the novel. The body is the force that creates the novel’s philosophical musings. It is the body that moves the narrative into the wilderness. In this thesis, I wish to direct attention back to the body. By this I mean, the massive, hairless body, out of which comes the judge’s ethics of war. The feces-covered body of James Roberts. The temporarily able-bodies of the kid and the gang as they seek to place last in a dangerous race to disability. These bodies desire to speak, and I hope to let them. Concepts of disability pervade the text and root the characters in a normative world. But the

1 disabled bodies of the judge and the James Roberts (or the suggestion of their

disability), coupled with the kid’s strange soft spot for the newly disabled, complicates the novel’s perceived normativity and presents disability as yet another topic to be grappled with. In the world of the novel, “all phenomena were bequeathed a strange equality and no one thing nor spider nor stone nor blade of grass could put forth claim to precedence” (McCarthy 258), and it is the disabled body’s chance to speak.

This introduction serves several purposes. First, it introduces the current status of Blood Meridian scholarship through a selective literary review. It is my hope to show that, while fruitful, criticism on the novel has favored metaphysics over the physical, the

cosmic over the body. Next, I make a case for reading the novel in bodily terms by

analyzing the pitfalls of metaphysical approaches. Third, I will introduce Disability

Studies as a promising new lens through which to read the novel, and eventually, all of

McCarthy’s work. Finally, I will outline what is to come. Each chapter will further complicate the concept of disability in the novel. It is my hope that my work here will be

a valuable addition to McCarthy research and will raise interest in viewing his work

through the disabled body.

Bloody Philosophy: A Review of Scholarship

Cormac McCarthy’s fifth novel defies interpretation. Vereen Bell, in his foundational 1988 study The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy, writes that McCarthy’s novels “resist the imposition of theses from the outside, especially conventional ones,

2 and they seem finally to call all these theses into question” (13). Yet Blood Meridian has continued to produce vast scholarship. Far from stifling attempts at interpretation, the

novel’s resistance to the imposition of meaning has led to a vast archive of interpretations. McCarthy is now among the most written about living writers. After the

publication of All the Pretty Horses, and since the successes of No Country for Old Men

and The Road, both of which were adapted to screen, scholarship on McCarthy is consistently growing. McCarthy and his prose have been studied in diverse areas, from,

“Marxism (Chollier, Holloway), to Feminism (Sullivan), to Gnosticism (Luce; Mundik), to

Ecology (Peebles) to Bakhtinian approaches (Gilbert); to fields such as Animal Studies”

(Monk 116). The most recent approaches to McCarthy have been environmental,

existential, ideas of modernity and postmodernity, the concept of a Trilogy, and the

nature of adaptation, as well as biographical, historical, and colonial approaches.

Despite All the Pretty Horses opening up McCarthy to mainstream criticism, it

has been Blood Meridian and The Road which have received the most attention. The

first marks McCarthy’s move west and is widely considered to be his masterpiece.

Readers of Horses went back and discovered a horrible gem. Its characters (specifically the judge), the brutality of its border landscape, and its epic, ethereal qualities have

raised the most questions. The Road brought McCarthy his Pulitzer Prize, his spot on

Oprah’s Book Club, and a new avenue by which to study McCarthy: the apocalypse.

Recently, screen adaptations and play productions have garnered a performative

approach to McCarthy’s work. The Coen brother’s No Country For Old Men, Tommy Lee

3 Jones’s The Sunset Limited, and Ridley Scott’s The Counselor have added to the critical cloud that has surrounded McCarthy since Bell’s initial work. Finally, critics have

continued to move back through McCarthy’s work. His Southern literature, particularly

Suttree, has gained critical momentum. However, it is still Blood Meridian that demands the most attention.

Scholarship has naturally gravitated to the violence of the novel. Steven Frye’s chapter “Blood Meridian and the Poetics of Violence,” Richard Godden’s “Blood

Meridian: Itinerant Degenerates Bleeding Westwards,” and James Dorson’s

“Demystifying the Judge: Law and Mythical Violence in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood

Meridian” establish violence as the groundwork for the novel. Every reading of the novel deals with, at some level, blood. The punishing and ever-present gore of the novel permeates its scholarship. Dorson’s piece, while grounded in violence, also exposes two of the other most popular strands: the judge and Myth. The judge, who is given the

name Holden though few people ever use it, is at once horrible and wonderful, base and holy. He is pragmatic, rational, and ruthless. He embodies the punishingly bloody

landscape of the novel, and just as he dominates the earth and its people in the novel, he is the central figure in scholarship (Bernhoft; Hiller; Shaw; Stinson). The judge is also the epicenter for much of the novel's mythic quality. For a novel that is chiefly concerned with the body and earth, it is also deeply rooted in metaphysics and spirituality (though such readings are misled by the judge and narrator’s rhetoric). As such, a variety of studies, concentrating on classicism (Sorensen), to evolution (Douglas),

4 to Gnosticism (Daugherty) to the Biblical (Boguta-Marchel), have attempted to understand the higher workings in the bleak world of the novel. Finally, history and genre also generate a wealth of scholarship. Blood Meridian is a heavily researched

novel, and critics have been interested in McCarthy’s similar and different reworkings of

his primary sources, including Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confessions: Recollections of a

Rogue and Mayne Reid’s The Scalp-Hunters (Phillips).

Noteworthy in these readings is a tendency to extrapolate into metaphysical and philosophical realms. Scholarship is quick to mention the novel’s violence, but slow to acknowledge the bodies from which that blood flows. Blood in the novel – of which there is a surplus – leaves the body, returns to the earth, and is gone. Yet scholars

continue to see the blood as travelling to a higher ground, one where truth and meaning

can be found. Steven Shaviro’s “’The Very Life of the Darkness’: A Reading of Blood

Meridian,” begins at the natural level, describing the setting of the novel, the permeation of darkness and the infinite space. The novel moves laterally in his interpretation. “Blood Meridian,” he writes, “is a book, then, not of heights and depths, nor of origins and endings, but of restless, incessant horizontal movements” (145).

Despite this interesting (and I would argue, valid) description of the novel’s movement,

Shaviro nevertheless ventures to the “heights” he warns us don’t exist: “The radical epistemology of Blood Meridian subverts all dualisms of subject and object, inside and outside, will and representation or being and interpretation” (149). As is so frequently the case, a grounding in the novel’s physicality floats into, in this case, ontological

5 realms. Leo Daughery’s “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy” offers a similar approach. In this case, he finds vestiges of Gnosticism in the novel. For

him, the nihilism that is usually employed to explain the novel’s philosophical renderings is in fact nuanced in a way that aligns the book with Gnostic thought. Finally, Steven

Frye, a stalwart in McCarthy scholarship, suggests that the novel’s natural descriptions creates “a balance between naturalist materialism in its most extreme intellectual form and the dark romantic tradition that engages the question of cosmological mystery,

metaphysics, and the sublime” (79). Shaviro, Daugherty, and Frye see the movement of blood, the purpose of violence, as traveling outward from the body and into a metaphysical space.

The major pitfall of these articles is their reliance on the judge’s speeches to form a textual basis for their philosophical interpretations. Analyses of the judge offer

cursory acknowledgment of his massive figure. It is ironic that such a large body in the

novel does not translate to scholarship. The judge, who above all accounts for the

metaphysics of the novel, cannot be trusted as a mouthpiece for the novel’s philosophical meaning. As Dan Phillips notes, “Holden is not a ventriloquist’s dummy perched on the novelist’s knee, and we should not strain our eyes to see whether

McCarthy’s lips move when the judge speaks. He is not sounding the novel’s ‘themes’”

(442). The judge is a master rhetorician. We cannot be led to believe that each of his speeches represents his own perceptions (or the novel’s) of the universe. He contradicts himself. His words are situational; his speeches vary from person to person, from

6 language to language. He is a linguistic, anthropological, and historical genius, to be

sure; or, perhaps more accurately, he presents himself to be. Phillips notes that “it is a mistake . . . to regard his speeches as representative of his character. Because they are

first and foremost literary performances, the sum of his speeches does not equal a whole person. They are delivered as highly ironic and playful lectures” (441).

Furthermore, the judge operates in opposition with the other prime mover in the novel: the environment. The judge’s actions suggest that he seeks knowledge of the world so that he can dominate it. He makes catalogues and studies everything he finds,

not to celebrate the earth’s offerings, but to learn to control them. Andrew Keller Estes, in an ecocritical reading of the novel, determines that the judge represents “a caricatured form of Enlightenment thinking, that nature is a machine (or slave) whose

only use is to serve man” (117). Just like his rhetoric, the judge’s intimate connection with the landscape is a tactic to control everything, including his fellow man. It is a devious system whereby, through careful documentation and cunning rhetoric, the

judge can claim mastery over the world. The final image of the judge, naked and dancing, proclaiming his immortality, is evidence that perhaps he has succeeded,

evidence that those he persuaded and the earth he learned were properly tamed.

Everything he does, and all that he says, are rhetorically conceived. Finding a higher

meaning in the novel through the judge is falling victim to the judge’s rhetoric. I will discuss the judge’s rhetoric in greater detail, specifically how it relates to his physical appearance, in Chapter 2.

7 There is also historical evidence that separates the bridge from corporeality to metaphysics. John Sepich’s essential article, “Historical Sources in Blood Meridian,” describes what is at stake in the business of scalping. In addition to being highly lucrative

(at that time, a group of fifty men could return only four Indian scalps to equal the annual salary of the United States Army), the removal of the scalp carries spiritual meaning (124). The common religious interpretation of the scalp, as believed by Indians at that time, was that there are two ways a soul can be excluded from entering its posthumous afterlife: being scalped and dying by strangulation. Richard Dodge

describes the former method, saying, “Let the scalp be torn off, and the body becomes

mere carrion, not even worthy of burial” (123). In addition to serving as “proof” that the scalp hunters had indeed killed an Indian, the removal of the scalp also kills the Indian’s afterlife. Scalping serves a dual purpose. Once the Indian’s corporeal state has been compromised, so too has their spiritual potential. The second method, strangulation,

applies specifically to the judge. He exhibits enormous strength, strength that he uses to

crush and strangle several people in the novel. In one instance, the judge both strangles

and scalps a young girl. More than anybody, the judge most thoroughly destroys the

Indian’s connection with their spiritual afterlife.

Noteworthy here is the judge’s connection with the Comanches. In a setting

where heteronormativity is nearly ubiquitous among the “civilized,” white men, the

judge’s penchant for young boys aligns him closer with the Comanches, who also are

depicted as turning to sodomy on their enemies. It is important to note that while

8 Glanton’s gang also participates in violent sex acts, it is heterosexual. Sadly but firmly, such acts still fall within the heteronormative code of the frontier. Patrick Shaw suggests that “the Indians feminize their enemy and force him to pantomime the one sex act that is abhorrent to the white man’s frontier culture” (112). By calling explicit attention to the judge’s preference for the male body, McCarthy unites Holden and the Indians against the heteronormativity of the other white men. This connection is important

because, if we believe that Holden and the Indians are linked via sexual degradation –

and since the judge so thoroughly thwarts the Indians’ afterlife, then the main source of

philosophical, metaphysical pontification is also the character that most rigorously destroys the link between corporeality and the afterlife.

In addition to the judge, the other entry point for philosophical inquiry is

McCarthy’s writing. It is no question that McCarthy writes with “a neo-Biblical rhetoric,” or that his prose “reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby-Dick”

(Banville 45; Cheuse 5). The episodic format of the novel recalls the picaresque tradition,

while McCarthy’s effortless blend of American description and philosophical heritage creates a strange and stirring conglomeration of Faulkner, O’Connor, Hemingway,

Dostoevski, Conrad, Neitzche, and Heidegger (Phillips 435). McCarthy deftly weaves the

profane and spiritual, the earthly and cosmic, into his prose, often in the space of a single sentence. Everything is at once employable, from the ultra-violent to the

immaculate. Everything is fair game. A quick glance at any page of the novel reveals the

egalitarianism of his writing: “They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running down the

9 narrow chines of the ridges and onto the plain like the ruins of old walls, such auguries

everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any living thing” (McCarthy 52).

Everything exists temporarily and infinitely: “They’d been given blankets and squatting by the desert fires at night sunblackened and bony and wrapped in these serapes they

looked like God’s profoundest peons” (75). Everything holds little significance, yet is

described with cosmic terminology, like the “Itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague” (82). Nothing is too insignificant as to be undeserving of an epic simile. Consequently, nothing is too significant to warrant preferential poetry.

McCarthy uses similes, metaphors, personification, and cosmic language democratically.

In the novel’s words, “all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock becomes endowed with unguessed kinships” (259). One of those kinships is in description. It would be whimsical to give rhetorical or poetic preference to Glanton, the landscape, or

God. Instead, the same descriptive spectrum, the same cosmic position, is endowed in all that exists in the novel, “as if the very sediment of things contained yet some residue

of sentience” (258). So the language of the novel becomes a second entry point to the philosophical. The novel’s countless similes and effortless blending of the sacred and profane suggest that the novel is to be understood as a seamless combination of the

earthly and unearthly, and perhaps it is. But the same things that challenge the judge’s endorsement for speaker of the novel also challenge the prose of the narrator.

The novel warns us against putting too much stock in its philosophy-laden

language. Just as readers somewhat naively see the judge’s monologues as a

10 mouthpiece for the novel, so too do people read the cosmic language of the novel as an uncontestable invitation to consider the text metaphysically. Dana Phillips comments on the “strange equanimity of tone” in Blood Meridian, saying, “McCarthy’s use of vivid similes (such as the dead ‘lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust’) does not give the event a symbolic dimension. On the contrary, the similes seem

designed to increase the intensity and accuracy of focus on the objects being described

rather than to suggest that they have double natures or bear hidden meanings” (450).

By this reasoning, the cosmic language is employed for the exact opposite reason than as an invitation to extrapolate metaphysically; it is used to lend intensity to the natural world, contrasting with typical approaches. Like the judge, who uses philosophy and religion rhetorically to further his aims in the world, the narrator routinely turns to the

divine to showcase the profane. It is a similarly misleading tactic. The narrator, like the

judge, is semi-omniscient. The judge seems to be everywhere – all the men claim to have seen him before – but he also inhabits a physical form, one that moves and kills within an isolated group. The narrator uses the personal pronoun on the first page,

saying, “I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens,” suggesting a singular view of the

world. However, the lens quickly retracts, and has access to “all history” (3). The result is the illusion of narrative omniscience, which as Phillip Snyder argues, “serves to undercut any notions of narrative authority” (132). The narrator seems to have no personal stake in the narrative. As such, the rich, neo-biblical style of the narrator seems to serve no higher purpose other than intense description. Because the narrator uses the quickly

11 vanishing personal pronoun, the purpose and function of the narrator remains unclear.

What is clear, though, is the narrator’s stunning grasp of descriptive power. The

landscape, even the judge, is at the mercy of the narrator’s powerful words. Snyder comments that the judge “dances to that narrator’s tune, not his own, even as his rhetorical and other powers seem to make everyone in the novel dance to his tune”

(132). Even the powerful judge, the towering presence that most mistake for the novel’s thematic mouthpiece, is at the descriptive mercy of another cunning, brilliant,

unreliable presence.

Of course, such approaches are valuable and important to consider. A novel of this magnitude, which grapples with the cosmic, can only benefit from metaphysical treatments. However, as the novel is read for the metaphysical, the physical is left

behind. The novel’s narrator advocates an “optical democracy,” an equal treatment of

all things. The “strange equality” submits that nothing “could put forth claim to

precedence” (258). Everything must be considered. Everything is important and deserves equal consideration. It is an egalitarian vision. “Optical democracy” forms an important and sustained theme throughout this thesis. So too should criticism consider

every avenue. Nothing in the novel is inconsequential. The smallest detail is given epic significance. The body becomes a marginalized standpoint that offers an unconsidered view of the novel. While I am not discounting previous, philosophical scholarship, I am pushing for a corporeal consideration of the novel, one that embraces and celebrates

the multitude of bodily difference found in Blood Meridian.

12 A Move to Corporeality: Disability Studies

What is missing in this scholarship is a turn to corporeality. The novel’s premise

– and the actors who exercise the premise and the hundreds of extras who die in the name of that premise – is concerned with the body. It behooves us, as McCarthy

scholars, to take a lesson from the novel. Captain White, the racist, war-mongering

leader who enlists the kid to continue the fight for American values, is steeped in lofty,

ideological thinking:

What we are dealing with, he said, is a race of degenerates. A mongrel race, little better than niggers. And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there’s no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That’s right. Others come in to govern for them. (36)

White’s impetus for leading his group of filibusters into Mexico is predicated on imperialism. McCarthy offers a character who deals in abstraction, whose purpose becomes a cruel rebuttal of America’s philosophy of Manifest Destiny. It is ironic that even though he deals in abstraction, the basis of his argument is the raced body.

Nevertheless, he ignores the actuality of his landscape. The kid, unaffected by the

rhetoric of Captain White, responds to his ideological prosthelitizing with: “What about a saddle?” (37). The kid is concerned with the logistics of the mission, with the very real need to take the material into account. In a horrifying and illuminating juxtaposition,

Captain White and his company are vanquished by Comanches. Reversing Captain

White’s abstract thoughts, the novel introduces the horde materialistically:

13 A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a blood stained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and on in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and on in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts (54-55).

While White and his company were discussing politics, the savages were donning their

wargear and arming themselves. The passage is a violent critique of White’s insistence on non-corporeal philosophy. The “legion of horribles” is described from head to foot, and individually. Indeed, the sentence continues through several other members of the

war party and seems as if it could continue through each of the “hundreds.” It is a frenzied focus on the body and its accessories. In the ensuing events, White and his company are viciously and easily disposed of. Their bodies are scalped, speared,

clubbed, and sodomized. The Comanches penetrate the filibusters, animatedly and inanimately – an ultimate reminder that the body must, and will, be considered.

What makes the kid and the Glanton Gang so “successful” in their mission is

their acceptance of and willingness to participate in a culture that is primarily concerned

with bodies. If their mission is to disable bodies and collect scalps, they are a rousing

success. Because they enter their contract on a corporeal level (they are not killing in the name of ideology; they are killing to retrieve tangible scalps that become tangible currency), John Glanton and his gang are allowed to survive and endure the same

14 brutality that ended Captain White’s brief campaign. Scholarship on the novel would do well to heed the lesson of Captain White, to forego philosophical interpretations, if only briefly, and turn attention to the body. The body is the thing that carries out the action.

The body is implicit and accountable for the brutality of the novel. Finally, whatever

metaphysical ends can be reached in interpreting the book, the body is the means by

which they are accomplished.

The method I will use to explore the body in Blood Meridian is Disability Studies.

The discipline of Disability Studies is a fairly recent, but robust, avenue of criticism.

Because it is a rich and nuanced theoretical field, a brief understanding of Disability

Studies is helpful in describing the approach I will be taking. The main split in the

understanding of disability, as introduced in Depoy and Gilson’s “Disability Studies:

Origins, Current Conflict, and Resolution,” is between the medical and social models.

With the advent of modern medicine, it was believed that people with disabilities, those with physical and cognitive impairments that prevent the person from performing

occupational and day to day functions, could be “cured.” Essentially, the idea focuses on

the limitations of the individual and seeks to treat and “make normal” those that

maneuver in society. In response, scholars of social sciences and the humanities developed the social model of disability. This way of addressing disability believes the

“problem” of disability lies in society’s limiting and able-bodied construction of the

disabled body. At the core of this model is the question of normalcy. As Lennard Davis writes in his introduction to The Disability Studies Reader, “the problem is the way that

15 normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person” (2). The social

model maintains that the issue rests in society’s construction of what constitutes normal. That is, the disabled person is not inherently limited, abnormal, or in need of cure; the disabled body is deemed as such due to the systematic construction of normality and abnormality in an able-bodied society. The crux of studying disability is not medical but political – ideological and hegemonic – and sociological. Davis concludes

that “the very term that permeates our contemporary life – the normal – is a configuration that arises in a particular historical moment” (12). The science-based

medical model and the responding social model have created a binary in disability

studies. Recently, this duality is being challenged as integrative approaches to disability

have emerged (Depoy; Slingerland; Caroll). Disability is a combination of social

construction and biological limitation, both of which must be considered and changed for the benefit of the disabled body.

At the risk of taking an anthropocentric position on the novel, I must again place

significance on the concept of “optical democracy,” the idea that nothing visible in the

world holds significant weight over anything else. The novel supports this concept. It is important to note, then, that a corporeal reading of the novel is not meant to raise the

human body’s status above its landscape, or even above metaphysical scholarship.

Instead, I merely want to raise the human body to the same level as the other more

frequently considered things (nature and philosophy). Just as identity studies seek to give marginalized groups a distinct voice, I want to give the body a voice. Again, this is

16 not to showcase the preeminence of the body; the body is no more and no less eminent

than nature or philosophy. In this way, the body deserves its chance to speak, to create

parity and achieve a balanced, scholastic “optical democracy.”

Chapters: The Purgatory of Able-Bodies, the Rhetoric of Super-Ability, and James

Roberts

The first chapter will define disability in the novel, highlight the relationship between the disabled body and the unforgiving landscape, and introduce the kid as a complicating character in an otherwise brutally normative world. Essential to this chapter are foundational notions of normalcy and the ways that the disabled body

navigates marginalizing terrain. A major point in this chapter will be to highlight the

absence of any pathological definitions, medical treatment, organized disability culture,

or stable identity for the disabled body. The disabled body holds no recognized position

in the world of the novel. As such, once a body becomes disabled, it recedes into the

landscape; it returns to the earth. Those that are completely disabled are isolated but

otherwise allowed to encounter the world the best that they can. Those that are able- bodied and fall victim to disability, however, are left with the traditional “kill-or-cure”

trope. Of course, this trope is complicated in that “cure” does not imply an organized medical system; the body either heals or it must die. In this way, debilitating injuries or

other physically limiting disabilities present death as the practical option. I will analyze

several characters to illustrate this purgatorial state that disability creates.

17 Only the kid complicates the idea that disabled bodies should be left to die while the others ride on. The kid occupies a powerful place in the narrative. His body is the

epitome of the ideal for the setting; he is strong, capable, and perhaps most

importantly, susceptible to becoming disabled. In the first few pages, the kid is shot. His recovery is a rare example of a character returning form a disability to join in the able- bodied task of scalp hunting. Most interesting, though, is the frequency with which the

kid is left with a disabled companion. In these situations, the kid is confronted with the

choice of “putting down,” leaving to die, or dragging along an injured member of the group. While the typical method is to simply ride on, the kid struggles with this. He looks back, he carries the wounded, he looks for food for them, or he leaves a gun in order to transfer the choice to the disabled body. The kid complicates the novel’s normative

treatment of disability by questioning prevailing tendencies and establishing a

productive gaze, one that implies social recognition of the non-normative body.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson will inform my analysis of the gaze. Specifically, I contend that, despite modern, negative associations with staring, establishing a gaze in Blood

Meridian is a productive, progressive action.

My second chapter will, having established the role of able-bodies in the novels,

turn to the judge. While the kid has plenty of similarly able colleagues, there is only one

judge. The judge is an anomaly in the wilderness. Totally bald from head to foot, he has what we would probably consider some sort of disease; we would most likely consider

him disabled in terms of his environment. Yet the judge is super-able. He connects with

18 the Earth. His intellect exceeds everyone else’s in the book. At times he seems

omnipresent. He is ethereal, mythical, and god-like. In some ways, it seems that his apparent disability endows him with some of these qualities. In this way, the judge’s baldness and size are only suggestions of disability. There is nothing limiting about his visible abnormalities. His hairless and giant figure might make him conspicuous, but it

also adds to his intimidatingly mysterious presence. He subverts both the time period’s conceptions of the disabled body as well as modern definitions.

Because there is so much scholarship on his character, this chapter will acknowledge and expand upon relevant criticism in order to both add to previous discussion and form a working understanding of how and why the judge comes to hold such a position of power, and how his visible differences do not impede – perhaps potentiate – his prowess in the novel. Studies on the judge have classified him as a

Miltonic character, an American western embodiment of Shiva, and, convincingly, an archon of Gnosticism. Given his physical appearance, masterful rhetoric, and mythic stature, I will argue that a better comparison would be with the god of metallurgy:

Hephaestus. Pointing to Jay Dolmage’s work on the rhetoric of disability and classical

renderings of disabled gods, I will show that the judge can be convincingly aligned with the disabled god, Hephaestus, and his unusual but celebrated brand of rhetoric: mētis.

Critical to this reading of the judge is the link between his physical body and his cunning

rhetoric. Finally, using this understanding of his character, I will describe the ways in

19 which the judge further problematizes disability in the novel, negates ability, and celebrates super-ability.

My third chapter will focus on James Roberts, commonly called the idiot. Roberts has not gotten much sustained attention. Critics seem to read over his parts in the

novel. He exists, and he is present, but he adds little to the narrative and certainly doesn’t add dialogue. Given the previous chapters, which will prove that such a punishing landscape has room only for able-bodied or super-able-bodied characters, this section will attempt to answer the simple question of why Roberts exists in the novel.

How does he survive so long? He becomes a companion to the judge. Why is he picked

to be a partner to a mentally and physically superior character? To jumpstart what has been a very limited conversation about James Roberts, much of this section will be my

own reading of his moments in the narrative and my own hypotheses as to how and why he occupies such a position. I look at the history of idiocy in America as well as the

historical functions of idiot figures in literature. I show that on a surface level, James

Roberts' character does reinforce the idea of narrative prosthesis – the idea that

disabled characters exist only to serve the plot or to distinguish other characters. Yet

Roberts does more than fall easily into such a convenient compartment. What is at stake

with James Roberts is the nature and definition of what it is to be a person in the world of the novel. Roberts will become the pivot point in the thesis. If the kid and the judge

complicate a normative society, James Roberts threatens to unhinge it.

20 The conclusion offers a final understanding of disability as it functions in the

novel. It is important to note that I do not anticipate there being any liberating or

uplifting message for the disabled body, or any body for that matter. What I hope to

determine is if McCarthy is using disability for exploitative purposes, or if there is a deeper working to his inclusion of disabled characters. As I will show, the interplay of ability and its outliers – disability and super-ability – calls personhood into question, and offers a definition of personhood that relies just as much on language as it does on physicality. In this way, while James Roberts comes close to personhood and the kid tries to help people keep their personhood, only the judge, who has a surplus of both, is free to wield his personhood at will. But even the supremacy of the maleficent judge is subject to the changing landscape of the novel’s epilogue, further diminishing the

individual importance of the novel’s images of disability and super-ability, leaving only

the slow, steady, able, march of geological time. Like the novel itself, the conclusions I

find will be born out of the landscape. The characters come from their time and place,

and my understanding of disability in the novel will be consistently concerned with the

relationship between disabled charactersd an their place. At any rate, the conclusion brings an original and well-studied argument to McCarthy discourse, one that should be

applied to his other works.

21 CHAPTER II

“THEY RODE ON”: DEFINING ABILITY, THE PURGATORY OF DISABILITY, AND

ESTABLISHING A GAZE

To accurately speak to the manifestations of disability in McCarthy’s body- oriented text, we must first formulate a working definition of disability in the novel. This chapter will offer a definition of disability as it applies to the time, place, and situation of the novel, examine the lives and deaths of disabled characters, and finally, discuss the

kid’s subversive actions related to the treatment of the disabled.

The Ability to Disable: Defining Disability

The setting of the novel begins with the kid’s birth in 1833, during the Leonids

meteor shower. In the late 1840’s he meets the judge and it is not long after that he

takes up with Glanton and his gang. Spatially, the novel straddles the Mexican-American

border and spans much of the Southwestern frontier, from Texas to California. The frontier of Blood Meridian must be seen as socially isolated from the mainstream social and scientific movement of contemporary America, especially with regard to disability.

22 That is, the prominent ideas associated with the historical marginalization of disabled

Bodies can only be flimsily applied to the context of McCarthy’s text.

Mitchell and Snyder, in their book Cultural Locations of Disability, acknowledge

the predominant eighteenth-century ethos of viewing disability as embodied; the social inferiority, dependency, and marginalization of disability is a result of pseudo-science’s insistence that physical signifiers could account for social ills associated with “idiocy” and “deviance” (35). Physical observation, as practiced through craniometry,

phrenology, palmistry, psychology, and physiognomy, equated internal deviance and subsequent social deterioration, which were manifested and signified by the body. As a result, the emerging industrial United States, seeing disability as a “fully tragic consequence of embodiment gone awry, one that extracted individuals from productive

membership in a capitalist society,” developed a private and state sponsored system of charity (37). This emerging system of disability obeyed the following principles: first,

with a “scientific” basis for body taxonomy, the resulting hierarchy of bodily norms produced a deficient population, “the legion of the defective, delinquent, nonproductive, and the burdensome” (39). Next, this deviant population, in an industrial society that values the individual contribution of each of its constituents, became an endeavor to manage delinquent bodies in an effort to reintegrate them into productive

society. Finally, as institutions such as asylums sought to eradicate disability through natural cures only to fail and become penal colonies for the aberrant, the disabled population’s dependency in the eyes of the nondisabled became a source of anxiety. 23 Thus, physical markers of delinquency became bodily delineations for those who deserved the benefit of public and private charitable initiatives.

As a result, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, Americans living in towns and cities began to sour over the dependence of the deviant population on charity.1

Asylums were not temporary pit stops for disabled bodies waiting to be cured so that

they can return to a productive society, they became custodial, permanent prisons for

defective bodies that couldn’t be fixed. The failure of the charity system and the distaste of disability dependence precipitated a burgeoning and socially slanted answer to the

problems of charity: eugenics (Mitchell and Snyder, Locations 40). Lennard Davis

identifies the statistical basis for eugenics, “the idea that population can be normed” and, subsequently, the “next step” is “for the state to attempt to norm the nonstandard” (3). Early practitioners of what would become eugenics linked physical deficiencies with social ills. Unemployment, alcoholism, prostitution, sexual deviances,

all manner of public harm could be attributed, biologically, to the scourge of disabled citizens. Rather than turning to charity as the answer, eugenicists argued that ignoring

the defective population would deteriorate the American population (9). So began disability as a truly delineated minority, as they were carted to penal training schools –

1 It is vital to note that most of Blood Meridian’s plot unfolds in an area of the Southwest that straddles the unstable US/Mexico border, and that Hispanic culture dominates in many of the plot’s locales. Mitchell and Snyder do not consider Hispanic culture in their history of American disability. A specific history of disability in Mexico could not be found, though it is clear from modern legislation and humanitarian efforts that the rights of the disabled is a recent, growing issue. As such, I refer rather exclusively to American disability history, not to diminish the importance of the novel’s Mexican- American, but because that research does not yet exist. Finally, I am aware that this thesis adopts a colonizers’ point of view, but so too does the novel and the available sources. 24 similar to asylums in that they housed and isolated the debased population, but

different in that their operators made no effort to alter the incurability of the residents,

and the institutions earned no public dissatisfaction. The deficient population was poisoning society and needed – deserved – for the good of the country, to be isolated

from their able, productive counterparts.

I’m painting with a broad stroke in order to illustrate the historical solutions that

were created to “deal” with the disabled population. Disability in the United States has historically been an effort to manage, understand, and define the disabled body. Even

still, with the “The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990” and its subsequent

amendment, America is still struggling to determine what disability is and how it should be handled. I highlighted the charity and eugenics movements to show America’s approach to disability during the time Blood Meridian is set in order to determine the

ways in which the frontier location of the novel displays attitudes different from those

that were prevalent in the East. Namely, charity for disabled bodies is not present in the

novel. There may be a hierarchy of bodily norms, but it is social, not pathological or

medical2. The social system values bodies that are able to disable and bodies that can adequately produce language, a concept I will consider in greater detail in Chapter 3.

Simply put, there is no clear social obligation to ostracize or eradicate a deviant

population. Furthermore, the only character with the scientific wherewithal to identify

2 The social hierarchy takes for granted that able bodies are otherwise acceptable in terms of gender. Most of the novel’s characters are male, and there is a pervasive importance on maleness. While it is important to note the lack of femaleness in the novel, Sarah Borginnis complicates this overarching maleness. She will be discussed in the Conclusion. 25 deviant bodies beyond obvious physical markers is the judge, and he himself might

appear to belong in that population. The judge practices phrenology. He takes a scientific interest in disability. He is linked with both science and the deviant. There are

physical markers, to be sure, but any isolation or marginalization of disabled bodies is socially constructed in the very different setting of the Mexican/American border.

Charity does not reach that far, and eugenics does not apply within a bloodthirsty band of scalp hunters. The definition and treatment of disability is specifically determined by

the unique context of the novel’s setting.

Given the historical context, I want to offer a working definition of disability in the novel's world. Important here is the distinction between disability among scalp hunters and disability in the various civilizations they meet. For Glanton, the kid, and his gang, being able-bodied is being able to disable someone. To be a competent scalp hunter, whose goal it is to disable and kill, you must be able to ride a horse, shoot a gun,

participate in hand to hand combat, and most importantly, you must be able to remove

scalps. Thus, disability occurs when someone becomes unable to perform these tasks.

Among the scalp hunters, then, disability almost always manifests physically. Someone

breaks a leg, cannot walk or ride a horse. Someone gets shot in the arm and the wound becomes gangrenous, and he cannot wield a knife. Following a skirmish, “three of

Glanton’s party were killed and another seven wounded, four of whom could not ride”

(214). The inability to ride a horse leaves the wounded men as good as dead. They are

no longer able to perform the everyday duties of a scalp hunter. Therefore, they are left

26 behind. Mental disability, apart from the most extreme cases, is not a factor in disabling

Native Americans. In fact, it seems that Glanton and the judge specifically recruit those

who we would today consider mentally disabled. Given the nature of sociopaths and psychopaths, mental disability can actually help the mission of a scalp hunter if it

diminishes the ethical or moral dilemmas that accompany killing men. The ex-priest

Tobin recalls that, when the gang was saved by the judge’s homemade gunpowder, the

judge “appeared to be a lunatic and then not. Glanton I always knew was mad” (133).

Mental disability aids in Glanton’s ruthless savagery, the judge’s calm in the face of death, and the perseverance of the gang. I bet that, in some capacity, we would consider most of the scalp hunters mentally disabled. It is their physical body that

matters. Able-bodiness is defined by maneuverability and a capacity for brutality.

An exemplary character who embodies the complicated nature of disability in the novel is Toadvine. Toadvine is one of the first companions the kid meets. They

establish a violence-based friendship after they have a skirmish. In a drunken

showdown, the cause of which seemed to be a game of pedestrian chicken, Toadvine

vows to kill the kid and attempts to stick a jagged bottleneck in his eye. Upon coming to,

the kid is made aware that Toadvine did not mean to injure the kid, but instead he

meant to kill him. Examining Toadvine, the kid notices that, in addition to burned letters on his forehead, “the kid could see that he had no ears. He [Toadvine] stood up and sheathed the knife and started up the walk with the boots in his hand and the kid rose

and followed” (11). Toadvine wears the markings of what we would probably consider a

27 disability. While it is clear that he can still hear, he displays a physical marker that might,

in more traditional, civilized surroundings, be medically or socially constructed as a disability. Yet Toadvine can fight. His actions immediately following his physical introduction shows that he can walk, operate a knife, and win the respect of a fellow

ruffian. Toadvine is able-bodied. So able-bodied in fact, he leads the kid straight to Old

Sidney, a violent man that Toadvine holds an unnamed grudge against. The barman warns Toadvine against confrontation, saying, “he’ll shoot you” (12). Nevertheless,

Toadvine and the kid smoke him out, and Toadvine proceeds to “pry out an eyeball with his thumb” (13). There seems to be a connection between Toadvine’s missing ears and this signature way of disabling his enemies. It is as if he recognizes that those who removed his ears left him able-bodied, and that, because he understands the

shortcomings of that method, he chooses instead to remove the eyes of his victims to leave them incapacitated. In this case, what may at first appear to be a disability, may

actually have been a learning experience in how to successfully disable someone else.

Toadvine has no ears; he is branded, disfigured, and, perhaps more so because of those

markings, he is viciously able-bodied.

Toadvine lost his ears, presumably in a quarrel or in some torturous act. Yet his physical prowess granted him escape. It is clear that Toadvine is not in the business of granting charity. Those who removed his ears may have done him a favor, but it is clear

that Toadvine will not pay that charity forward. The scene seems to mock the Eastern

American idea of charity. By sparing Toadvine’s life, his torturers secured the future

28 deaths of many able-bodies. In this way, charity effectively breeds more disability. At the very least, charity allows for the continuation of disability, both on the frontier and in

Eastern towns. James Roberts, who will be discussed in Chapter 3, is an example of how charity not only failed, but led to further emphasis on the disabled body. Again we

see the proliferation of an “optical democracy.” It doesn’t matter where a disabled body

is encountered, and how advanced social constructions seem, disability is given equal vision on the frontier and in civilization.

Disability in Civilization and on the Frontier

There is a separation between disability among the scalp hunters and disability in the civilizations that they travel through. In these cities, disability bears more

resemblance to the disability of Eastern America in that deficiencies are identified and isolated. One glaring difference, however, is lack of established systems of charity. In these towns, which straddle and blur the Mexican/American border, the deficient

population is a conflation of the disabled and poor, prostitutes and criminals. When

Glanton’s gang enters Chihuahua City, the distinction between the productive, able population and the deviant population is described in a neat, two paragraph passage.

The first describes the “idlers reclined on carven seats,” the “governor’s palace,” the

“cathedral,” and the interested citizens who guide the marauders through the city

among “flowers and proffered cups.” This population is aligned with the scalp hunters,

with the able-bodied mission of the gang. They are associated with Christian imagery,

29 political power, and disposable goods. The gang then passes through the deficient

population which receives its own paragraph. Here the gang encounters “alms-seekers,”

“maimed beggars,” “the shriveled eyes of the blind,” “lepers moaning,” “small orphans,”

“fools and sots drooling and flailing,” and “prisoners” (76). Here, we encounter a conflated underworld where all non-productive, dependent, disabled, and incarcerated people are deemed distinct and separate from the rest of the city. Later, they enter the

town of Ures and are met with “a following of rabble unmatched for variety and sordidness by any they had yet encountered, beggars, and proctors of beggars, and whores and pimps and vendors and filthy children and whole deputations of the blind and the maimed and the importunate all crying out” (208). Again, there is a conflation of disability and depravity, of impairment and illegality. Together, the deficient population forms a “rabble” who are combined in their shared “sordidness.”

In the terrain of the novel, the Othering of this population mirrors that of contemporary American disability in that any body that is deficient – physical, mental, penal, occupational – is grouped and isolated. Together, they occupy a distinct section of the city, a residential cauldron for the unproductive, the pitiful. Yet unlike disability in other parts of United States, where disability leads to charity and charity leads to eugenics, in the border regions the deficient population is left to its own devices. There

is no system of asylums, no custodial penal colonies for “idiocy.” They are separated but

not removed from the rest of the population. Nature is left to take its course. Those that

will die will die and no amount of moaning, drooling, begging, or flailing will bring about

30 a system of charity. In a way, though, the deficient population in the novel ends up in a

similar position to their non-frontier counterparts. In the “civilized” United States, charity led to maintenance which led to the seemingly necessary solution of eugenics.

Without charity, the disabled population in Blood Meridian is allowed a natural course

to the same solution. There is no charity, no scientific hierarchy that marks them as deficient. They simply look, act, and perform differently, and a more violent, social – as opposed to state-mandated – eugenics takes control. Without an established system of charity, there is no “problem” to be dealt with via eugenics. A purely social hierarchy is established, one in which deviant markers are socially acknowledged and marginalized

accordingly. Ironically, the scalp-hunters may well have belonged to this population, but

the ability and inclination – you must have the proper mental state as well – to disable others elevates them out of this group.

Another facet of the city-dwelling disabled that informs how they are presented in the text is their stationary position. The scalp hunters are nomadic; they wander.

Those bodies that are conflated into a deviant population are rendered such in part

because they remain stationary long enough to fall into the squalor of civilization. The

Glanton gang remains relatively unchallenged in their criminality and able-bodiness as they ravage the landscape. Only when they trade their nomadic existence for a stationary ferry operation, a makeshift civilization (so far as being stationary

necessitates features of civilization), does the gang begin to resemble and inhabit a position that more closely aligns with the disabled bodies in town. Barcley Owens cites

31 this departure as indicative of the novel’s kinship with literary naturalism. In this genre,

there is a motif whereby arrogant, successful characters fall to complacency. For Owens,

the Glanton gang’s months of successful scalp hunting leads to carelessness when they stop at the Yuma River. There arrogance leads to debauchery which leads to complacency – “which, in a harsh environment, is always fatal” (55). Perhaps this informs the distinction between the civilized disabled and the Glanton gang. When the

gang deviates from its alpha position in lawless spaces, when it becomes stationary, the

natural construction and conflation of deviance and disability begins. In this way,

civilization at once gives the disabled body a space in which to live, a designated position in the world, while creating the normative image of body and deviance that

leads to charity, pathology, and eugenics.

Purgatory of Fallen Bodies

The disabled bodies that reside in towns, the places the scalp hunters travel through, follow a familiar isolating marginalization that aligns with disability history in

America. For the scalp hunters, though, disability is purgatorial. While the disabled population in cities are left to their own devices, they are in cities, where survival, I

assume, is easier than on the frontier. But once the able-bodied scalp hunter is disabled,

he moves to a liminal place between life and death, a place where the earth wants back

its body and the living no longer have use for him. In Cormac McCarthy and the Writing of American Spaces, Andrew Estes offers a simple and powerful analysis of the

32 landscape of Blood Meridian. Simply put, Estes posits that the novel “deconstructs binaries and oppositions that have come to be seen as normative, for example,

culture/nature, civilization/wilderness, natural/manmade and technology/simplicity”

(114). I would add able/disabled, or some other combination that blurs the space

between temporal able-bodiness, the purgatory of disability, and the role of nature in facilitating death. Binaries are useful, and they are rigid in the novel, but there are more

to work with. Estes does well to draw focus to the slippery relationship between civilization and wilderness, a slipperiness that also informs the role of bodies within nature. The disabled body falls even closer between the two. Disability represents a space that closes even further the normative gap between man’s dominion and the dominated.

For the fallen body, a proudly able body who falls to disability, death is preferable to a prolonged life. During a conversation with the kid, a boy from Georgia

says, “I was sickern a dog . . . I was afraid I was goin to die and then I was afraid I wasnt”

(74)3. Without an able-body, death becomes the easiest option. Before the

Commanches slaughtered Captain White’s imperialist crusade, a few of his men fell sick, so sick “that they cried out to be left and then they died” (46). The agony of illness, of the fall from able to disabled, leaves them pitifully helpless. Death is the best answer.

3 Direct quotations do not have apostrophes in contractions. In general, McCarthy avoids superfluous punctuation, to the point of omitting quotation marks, semi-colons, and colons altogether. In a rare interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy cites James Joyce as an inspiration for keeping punctuation “to an absolute minimum.” He sees punctuation as “weird little marks,” and sees “no reason to blot the page” with them. 33 This goes for the scalp hunters’ victims too. Following one of the gangs “general” slaughters, McCarthy describes the men as they “lay coupled to the bludgeoned bodies of young women dead or dying on the beach” (163). To be disabled, to reside in that liminal place between able-bodied living and death, is to be helplessly exposed to the

crimes of the still able. Death becomes a release from disability. Following a battle,

several of the Native Americans in Glanton’s company are left disabled. An able-bodied

Delaware “took down his warclub from his bag and stepped astraddle of [a disabled

Delaware] and swung the club and crushed his skull with a single blow . . . his face and chest were freckled with blood. He touched up the horse with his heels and rode out”

(215). This interpretation of disability straddles the different cultures of the white scalp hunters and the Native Americans. For both groups, death is understood as preferable to living with a disability. Death is a release from living life disabled. Once a body has fallen and is no longer useful, death presents a tidy exit for both the disabled body and its still able comrades, who always quickly “ride on.”

In addition to the uselessness and preference for death, the disabled body is also useless to the group. Once a body falls there is no use in helping. Their gear is appropriated to the remaining able-bodies and the gang rides on. Fallen companions are

quickly forgotten. After the black Jackson is beheaded, “the men moved away. No one

spoke…Someone had taken his gun but the boots stood where he’d put them. The company rode on” (113). Here is a man that has rode with the group for some time. He is murdered by one of their own. But death is the premier feature of the land and they

34 silently move on. In a conversation with a group of riders, one of whom is shot through the chest, Irving explains that “there aint nothing to be done” (121). There is no hope for the disabled man. His injury leaves him ill-equipped for surviving the harsh landscape

and its people. He no longer has the abilities that mark a body as able; he has no value,

and therefore must be left to die. In a setting where “death seemed the most prevalent

feature of the landscape,” it is hard enough to survive and maintain being able-bodied

(50). Once you have fallen, you are caught between those that are capable of surviving

the deathly earth and those that have already returned to it. In this way, disability is against nature, in that it is a temporary stop on the body's return to the earth.

Disabled bodies are stuck in a limbo between a group of killers who no longer

have use for them and an opportunistic earth that is waiting for it to die. The novel’s landscape is frequently described as “hostile” and “thirsty,” a place that swallows up the dead. A Mexican man says, “this country give much blood. This Mexico. This is a thirsty

country” (108). The narrator describes the land's inhospitable nature, saying of its empty towns that a “desert wind would salt their ruins and there would be nothing, nor ghost nor scribe, to tell to any pilgrim in his passing how it was that people had lived in this place and in this place died” (182). The earth swallows up the dead. It feeds on fallen men. Scavengers await and quickly feed on dead bodies: “the dead were still in the streets and buzzards and pigs were feeding on them. The scavengers watched in silence while the company picked their way past like supernumeraries in a dream. When the last of them was gone they commenced to feed again” (189). There is an agreement

35 between the people of the land and the land itself. The earth waits for death and then swallows the bodies in its wake, and the scalp hunters respect the scavengers' feast and do not disturb them. They come across a similar feeding, where, “the bodies had been partly eaten and rooks flew up as the riders approached and a pair of buzzard began to trot . . . they went on” (230). The scalp hunters temporarily disturb the earth’s feeding,

but they quickly move, leaving the land to take its bodies back. Disability disrupts this process.

Sproule, for example, falls from able-bodied scalp hunter to a host for nature to feed on after surviving the Comanche massacre. Sproule makes it quite clear that he is no longer of use to the kid. When the kid suggests that they search for supplies in houses, Sproule urges the kid to “go on” without him. Throughout his final hours, natural scavengers follow him, waiting to feed. Seeing a pair of buzzards feeding on a dead body, Sproule “shooed his good hand at the buzzards and they bated and hissed and flapped clumsily but they did not fly” (64). No longer able-bodied, Sproule does not

wield the same strength over nature as he previously did. Nature does not respect his position, and his disability is non-threatening, promising to the landscape. Indeed, the

landscape is described as a “purgatorial waste,” where nature waits for Sproule to die.

The narrator describes him as “wounded in an enemy country far from home and although his eyes took in the alien stones about yet the greater void beyond seemed to swallow up his soul” (69). Even though Sproule is alive, his disability leaves him on the threshold of death. This purgatory does not go unnoticed. When he is sleeping, Sproule

36 wakes to find a sanguinary predator drinking his blood. Again, Sproule attempts to shoo the animal, but “the bloodbat flailed and sat back upon his chest and righted itself again and hissed and clicked its teeth” (69). Later, he looks at his disability and sees that

“small worms worked in the open wound” (70). The earth has already begun feeding on him. He remains alive but is treated as if he is dead. His wound has placed him somewhere between life and death.

The narrator offers other examples of the purgatorial nature of disability. When

the kid is imprisoned, the narrator describes “the moans of the dying out on the plain and see by its lantern the deadcart moving among them like a hearse from limbo” (80).

The cries of the disabled, those waiting to die, are described in purgatorial terms. In the

novel, disability occupies a liminal position where those without able bodies are no use

to the living or the dead. Being disabled, they cannot contribute to the world of the

living, and the earth awaits their death so it can begin its reclamation. In this way,

disability is an unnatural disruption of the bodies’ return to the earth.

Loo kin g Back: Th e kid ’s Sof t Sp ot f or D isab ilit y

Amidst the purgatory of disability, amidst the scalp hunters who ride on and the

earth that welcomes death, the kid shows a soft spot for the disabled body. First, he has survived a disability. He is shot in the novel’s opening pages and is nursed back to health by an unnamed, “hardlooking” woman while “the others look away” (4). He runs without giving compensation. But it seems as if he carries with him the desire to aid

37 disabled bodies. In the desert, fellow marauder Brown is shot with an arrow. He tries to

recruit one of the men to aid in removing the arrow, asking, “Will none of ye help a man?” (168). The engrained narrative of riding on, of leaving the disabled man to his uselessness, passes through the group as one after the other refuses to help. Nobody

helps a cripple. Then the kid stands up, and, in a subversive move, offers to help Brown remove the arrow. He succeeds, and Brown is appreciative. The kid saved this man from the purgatory of disability. The ex-priest Tobin, who occupies a mysterious, moral position in the novel, calls him a fool, and says, “God will not love ye forever . . . don’t you know he’d of took you with him? He’d of took you, boy. Like a bride to the altar”

(169). Tobin sees the kid’s helpfulness as a weakness, a dangerous vulnerability. By

coming to Brown’s aid in front of the group, the kid shows that he cares about the disabled body. Practically speaking, though, it also shows his reluctance in letting the

status quo run its course. It displays for the rest of the group that the kid may have

difficulty in leaving a fellow man behind; and he does.

I have addressed Sproule in relation to the purgatory of disability, but he is also significant in that the kid delays his return to earth by not letting him die. The kid urges

Sproule on, trying to prolong his life. He seeks out food, suggests that they find shelter,

and even offers to look at Sproule’s gangrenous arm. But Sproule is much more attuned to the typical workings of disability. He continually insists that there is nothing to be

done, that the kid’s efforts to help are in vain. Because the kid speaks very little in the novel, and because the narrator stays suspiciously far away from his psyche, it is unclear

38 what motivates the kid to help Sproule. Perhaps it is a sense of obligation to help a fellow white man. Perhaps he feels survivor’s guilt. After all, he was the only one whose

“soul rose wondrously” following the Comanche massacre, as if spared for some other

purpose or simply forgotten (58). Perhaps he remembers the woman that nursed his gun wound and realizes the fickleness, the temporariness of ability. At any rate, the kid fails in his efforts to help the dying Sproule. In fact, the only detectable consequence of the kid’s help is the prolonged duration of time Sproule had to reside in disability

purgatory. Without the kid’s efforts, perhaps Sproule may not have had to endure the earth’s sanguinary thirsts, nature’s impatience. At last, Sproule dies. The kid has used energy and time caring for him and has shared resources with him; furthermore, the kid gets arrested, which may have been avoided had he not been slowed down by Sproule’s disability. These are harsh reminders against interfering in the unnatural progression of disability. This is not a land of pathology or charity. The disabled body has no use and must – will – return to the earth, and any attempt to delay this process will result in increased suffering for the disabled and dying.

Another example of the kid’s weakness for disability comes when he is tasked with killing Shelby. Shelby is wounded after a “running fight” with a party of “armed

Sonoran cavalry,” in which “three of Glanton’s party were killed and another seven wounded, four of whom could not ride” (214). In accordance with their definition of disability, those who cannot ride must either be left to die or put down. The gang has decided to put him down and the kid is chosen to do it. This is deemed the merciful

39 choice, since, as Tate rhetorically asks, “you know what they’ll do to them?” (216). The gang rides away and Tate, who was to witness the mercy killing, also departs, leaving the kid and Shelby behind. The following passage is significant in that it gives us a deeper understanding of the disabled’s place and the kid’s apprehensions about killing a wounded man. Furthermore, it one of the longest bits of dialogue McCarthy gives us involving the kid. It is worthwhile to consider that the most the kid says in the novel, one

of the longest conversation the kid has in the entire book is with a disabled man. The kid and Shelby argue about his fate, the state of the disabled body and the ramifications of living, even though “Shelby had already lost it all”:

Why don’t you just get on with it? he said. The kid looked at him. If I had a gun I’d shoot you, Shelby said. The kid didnt answer. You know that, don’t you? You aint got a gun, the kid said. He looked to the south again. Something moving, perhaps the first lines of heat. No dust in the morning so early. When he looked at Shelby again Shelby was crying. You wont thank me if I let you off, he said. Do it then you son of a bitch. The kid sat. A light wind was blowing out of the north and some doves had begun to call in the thicket of greasewood behind them. If you want me just to leave you I will. Shelby didn’t answer. He pushed a furrow in the sand with the heel of his boot. You’ll have to say. Will you leave me a gun? You know I caint leave you no gun. You’re no better than him. Are you? The kid didn’t answer. What if he comes back. Glanton. Yes. 40 What if he does. He’ll kill me. You wont be out nothing. You son of a bitch. The kid rose. Will you hid me? Hide you? Yes. The kid spat. You caint hide. Where you goin to hide at? Will he come back? I dont know. This is a terrible place to die in. Where’s a good one? (216-217)

Curiously, next to nothing has been written on this exchange, even though it is an important and potent moment. Unlike other disabled men who “would die anyway…Shelby had had his hip shattered by a ball and he was clear in his head” (216).

Shelby cannot walk or ride a horse. He is disabled by the standards of the landscape and of Glanton’s gang. Free from the audience of the group, Shelby and the kid offer an earnest discussion about the fate of a disabled man. Like Tobin, Shelby readily admits that he would kill the kid in a reversed situation. The kid defers to Shelby’s judgement.

He allows Shelby to decide his fate. In a series of short replies punctuated by moments of silence, they decide that the injured man has little chance of survival if the kid spares him. Yet Shelby cries. He does not want to die. It can be argued that the kid would be

doing a merciful service by ending Shelby’s life. The life of a disabled man in a violent country is harsh. Hiding Shelby offers little hope, but it does remove the kid’s involvement in ending his life. Maybe it is cowardice that leads the kid to spare Shelby.

Maybe the kid recognizes the prevailing ideology of ability and questions its

41 pervasiveness, its hegemony, and challenges the status quo. As the kid leaves the

hidden Shelby, he “looked back at the wounded man” (218). This gesture alone separates the kid from the rest of the gang. In a system that values simply riding on, the

kid establishes a gaze.

The novel’s narrator mostly spares the reader from witnessing the kid’s involvement in the gang’s depravity. Though it is clear that he is present for the group’s most gruesome activities, and though it can be readily assumed that he participates, the

narrator rarely details any specific involvement of the kid. Perhaps this separates the kid from the evil of the gang. Or perhaps it serves to fully integrate the kid into the gang, as if he is no different than the common psychopaths that he rides with. At any rate, it is significant that McCarthy spares us the involvement of the kid and offers us this passage, a softer moment in the novel. This exchange also represents the only extended

interaction between an able-bodied man and a fallen scalp-hunter, making the

established gaze more unique and significant.

Modern disability disparages the gaze as a marginalizing gesture of supremacy.

Disability studies places negative connotations on staring, as explained by Rosemarie

Garland-Thomson. For Garland-Thomson, staring “creates an awkward partnership that

estranges and discomforts both viewer and viewed . . . staring thus creates disability as

a state of absolute difference rather than simply one more variation in human form”

(“Staring” 57). Garland-Thomson is writing about staring in the modern world, a world where normative culture has been established and offensive gazes must be combatted.

42 In modernity, staring contributes to “the history of disabled people in the Western world,” which can be defined by “being on display, of being visually conspicuous while politically and socially erased” (56). Staring contributes to stigmatization by calling unwanted and negative attention to markers of difference, however visible they may be.

The gaze is yet another weapon in the social construction of seeing and focusing on physical signifiers for disability.

But in Blood Meridian, without the established social constructs with which we

now disagree, a gaze can be seen as a positive force. It combats the typical frontier

method of simply riding on. It establishes a dialogue, a recognition of disability as an identity. It is an unfortunate, perhaps pitiful identity, but an observable one nevertheless. The kid talks with the disabled man, hears his pain, and looks back. He is building an identity for disability. Of course, he does leave him, and Shelby probably perishes soon after, but the kid makes small, deliberate steps that subvert the

normative culture of the novel. It runs counter to modern thinking, but perhaps a gaze

begins the process by which disability can be seen as a distinct state of being. Perhaps it

begins a series of events involving marginalization, charity, and pathology, but are these

not better than unthinking disposal? The kid disrupts the unseeing relationship between able-bodies and fallen ones; he looks back, sees disability, and problematizes the

ideology of “putting down.” Thus, the kid is a hopeful challenge to a system where, in civilization the disabled are members of a deviant population, and where, on the range,

marauders have no use for a fallen man. The kid sees the disabled body beyond these

43 social constructs and ignores the earth’s bloodthirsty beckoning. He is no champion for

disability, but in a novel that is wonderfully devoid of heroes, the kid makes small, meaningful steps towards recognizing the unique identity of disability. Gazing in the

novel supports “optical democracy” by visually connecting with something that hasn’t

previously received attention. It offers a meaningful step towards an egalitarian vision of

the world. After all, in a world where the disabled body is killed or left to die, isn’t staring better than not being seen at all?

44 CHAPTER III

“INVERSIONS WITHOUT END”: THE JUDGE AS HEPHAESTUS AND MALIGNANT METIS

The kid may hesitantly be considered the protagonist of Blood Meridian, but it is

the judge that demands attention in the novel, from its readers and its critics. Among

the most popular approaches to making sense of the judge is the practice of associating

him with another figure, and letting that comparison inform his character. As Ian

Bernhoft summarizes, the judge has provoked in criticism “an array of interpretations – literary, theological, and symbolic. He is Ahab and Whale, Iago and Macbeth; a Gnostic archon and Shiva the destroyer; the personification of Enlightenment rationalism,

Nietschean nihilism, or Manifest Destiny; the devil himself or culture itself” (27). Emily

Stinson provides her own list of comparisons – “God, the devil, the ruler of Earth, a trickster figure, an ethnographer, or Adam” – before positing a connection with Tarot’s

Fool (9). The list goes on, and every comparison is more or less valid, and a lot has been gained from these associations.4 The judge is a mythical, mysterious creation, and critics have rightly looked upon similarly grand characters to assign meaning to him. This

4 Some of the figures that the judge get compared with are disabled. While physical difference is sometimes mentioned in passing, it is little more than a surface comparison, a foot in the door. The comparisons rely more on the judge’s pontifications than physical appearance. Focusing on the judge’s metaphysics is a natural tendency, though I will show that the two are not mutually exclusive. 45 chapter will consider the usefulness of several these comparisons before offering a new

figure for comparison: Hephaestus. Using Jay Dolmage’s work on disability rhetoric, I will describe the judge in relation to Hephaestus’ embodied rhetoric, mētis – a cunning,

lateral, embodied rhetoric –one that accounts for both the judge’s trickery and his unusual body. I make a case for the judge’s body as essential to his rhetoric and therefore to his power in the novel. Finally, while the judge skews the ability-disability

spectrum – he is super-able in that he has a surplus of both language and physicality – he also skews the possible outcomes of mētis.

“Wh at ’s h e a ju d ge of ?”: Com p ariso n s t o th e Ju d ge and His Bod y

Judge Holden is verifiable, but only in Samuel Chamberlain’s memoir My

Confessions, which is itself historically suspect, according John Emil Sepich. Points of departure from Chamberlain to McCarthy are interesting and worth considering. First,

Chamberlain’s judge is described as having eyebrows and mustache, though

Chamberlain describes him as having “a face destitute of hair.” It seems McCarthy has generalized this text to the judge’s total, infant-like baldness. Chamberlain also describes his height, pegging him at “six feet six in his moccassins” (271). Furthermore,

Chamberlain’s judge possesses some of the qualities that lead to McCarthy’s judge’s mythic stature. He uses different names in different places, something that may have

been extrapolated into McCarthy’s judge’s ability to appear and reappear at will.

Chamberlain's judge was a Renaissance man. He knows about things that strike his

46 compatriots as odd; for example, he is described as being “acquainted with the nature

of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy”

(Chamberlain 271-72). Such empiricism would have been highly uncommon in an otherwise uneducated group. Also included in Chamberlain’s judge is the ability to diffuse tense situations, as when “Holden made some explanation to the crowd in

Spanish that appeased them” (287). Finally, Chamberlain’s judge was not without his vicious compulsions. Chamberlain notes “his desire was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him…and before we left

Frontereras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapel, foully violated and murdered” (126). From source to novel, Holden is a beastly, vicious, and persuasive man.

Comparisons involving the judge have turned up a number of diverse and creative associations. The first batch of comparisons focus on philosophical and mythological figures. Leo Daugherty, in a convincing piece, sees the judge as a Gnostic archon by answering the nagging question of what the judge is a judge of. For Leo

Daugherty, “he is judge of all attempts – including those of patronage-seekers – to place

him within that [patronage] system, and he thus judges all attempts inadequate” (165-

66). Stephen Frye sees the judge as the Nietzchean Übermensch, one who “defines his own morality and asserts his indomitable will upon the world” (83). James Dorson sees him as a judge of the dark underbelly of a rational-seeking but irrational society, a parody of Enlightenment rationalism. Bent Sørsensen says that “he is a Mephisto-like

47 character who tempts the kid on several occasion . . . and recalls the Devil’s temptation of Christ during his fast in the desert, and casts [the Judge] in the role of the Devil,

attempting to buy the kid’s soul” (23). Sørensen also sees the judge as having an integral part in the perverse katabatic quest of the kid. Rich Wallach reads the judge as “Shiva, who dances the dance of war and cosmic destruction” (129). Just as the arms of Shiva are thought to guide multiple destinies at once, Holden “is always serene amid the carnage he engenders.

Another set of comparisons focuses on historical figures and destructive

symbols. Iain Bernhoft reads the judge as the confidence man P.T. Barnum, master

manipulator of “artful deception.” Like Barnum, the judge practices “humbug as a way of aestheticizing and thereby justifying fraudulence” in order to divert attention away

from the “content of his deeds” (33). An epic showman, the judge uses illusion to

“recast bloodshed as wondrous spectacle” (37). He is the voice of marketing warfare, and his “learned rhetoric and dazzling displays . . . serve to celebrate and conceal the

realities of warfare, to repackage imperial violence as novel entertainment” (40).

Andrew Estes says the judge represents the offensive side “of an attack on Arcadia, the

middle landscape . . . the encroachment of technology, here specifically the reference is to weapons and explosives” (119). That is, he a researcher bent on domination of the natural world. For Sara L. Spurgeon, the judge is “the terrifying guide to the disintegration of the last vestiges of the old sacred hunter myth and its rebirth as the

modern myth of the American frontier” (22). Emily Stinson describes the judge as

48 Tarot’s Fooland Patrick Shaw submits that the judge’s degradation aligns him with the very savages he is tasked with slaughtering when he participates in the savage’s betrayal of the “heteronormative code” of the West.

Though these readings of the judge vary in scope, accuracy, and origin, they

share a powerful point of comparison. Convincingly, nearly every comparison encompasses some aspect of the judge’s rhetoric. Shiva deftly manipulates multiple destinies, the Enlightenment favors reason over rigid authority, the Miltonic Satan is charismatic and loquacious, and Tarot’s Fool is known for trickery. Critics are right to zero in on the judge’s cunning manipulation of his world, and every convincing comparison accounts for this quality. Few if any of the judge’s comparisons are read in relation to his body. I argue that the judge’s body is crucial to his rhetoric, and I will offer Hephaestus as an appropriate comparison, one that encompasses both his cunning

and its bodily basis. Using Jay Dolmage’s work on disability rhetoric, I argue that, like

Hephaestus, the judge’s rhetoric is embodied.

There is some critical precedence for placing importance on the judge’s physical presence, though it is scant. Rick Wallach, for example, abandons the physicality of the

judge just as he begins discovering its importance. He comments that the judge’s infantile appearance is described in exaggerated terms, noting that his features complements those of the kid, who has big wrists and big hands, even though he not

big. Pediatric imagery, Wallach notes, forms a “constellation” that “orbits the judge.” To unpack its meaning, he suggests that his infantile appearance exposes the “contrast

49 between Holden’s childlike features and his prodigious intellect, an intelligence that beggars credibility no less insistently than does his ubiquitousness” (127). Wallach then leaves the arena of the judge’s body to connect him with Shiva the destroyer. Wallach leaves the physical importance of the judge unsaid, but he does offer a foundation for

reading his unique body as connected with and influential of his unique intellect.

Further emphasis on his physical presence shows disability studies to be a useful unifier. There is historical and authorial precedent for considering the judge’s body essential to his rhetoric. The exaggeration of features creates the monolithic and off- putting figure of the judge. Chamberlain describes the judge as “gigantic” with a “fleshy frame” whose face was “destitute of hair.” McCarthy adapts and generalizes both the judge’s formidable stature and hairless features. His entire body is hairless, infant-like.

Moreover, while both Chamberlain’s and McCarthy's judges are pedophiles, McCarthy

reverses the gender of the victims described in the source, choosing to depict a giant,

infantile body that preys on undeveloped, young boys. This change is certainly concerned with the body. McCarthy exaggerates both the physical characteristics of the

judge and reverses the target gender of his pedophilia to create the monster of the

judge, one who has an abnormally large, boyish body and who preys on similarly boyish victims. Finally, Chamberlain describes the judge as changing names in different places,

presumably for anonymity or mobility. While Chamberlain’s judge is able to exist in multiple places via nomenclature, McCarthy extrapolates this fluidity of movement to a physical ability to literally be in multiple places and travel impossible distances.

50 Chamberlain’s allusion of omnipresence is literalized in McCarthy’s judge. Furthermore,

it adds to the judge’s mythos among the men who have claimed to see him everywhere.

After his public shaming of the preacher, the judge somehow beats the mob to the bar

(8). Tobin describes the gang’s fortuitous encounter with the judge just before he saves them with gunpowder, “and there he set. No horse, just him and his legs crossed,

smiling as we rode up. Like he’d been expectin us” (131). Again, it is a corporeal adaptation, a physical reworking of the source material.

McCarthy changes Chamberlain’s judge to increase his physical presence, exaggerate his savage bodily desires, and allow him an ever-present capability that

keeps his physical presence always relevant. The judge is a massive, bald man. He can be

anywhere, and he uses his size and maneuverability to prey of innocent, undeveloped bodies. Instead of reducing his body to something less than civilized, less than human,

McCarthy combines the judge’s physicality with a heightened intellect so that the judge successfully embodies the full spectrum of personhood, from the basest, bestial impulses to the highest orders of thinking. Chamberlain’s judge may have been imposing, but McCarthy’s is mythic. But, as I have shown, it is a physical myth, one born in physical characteristics and maintained by physical presence.

The Disabled God: Hephaestus and Mēt is

My examination of the judge’s masterful rhetoric invokes the rhetoric of mētis,

harnessed by the disabled god Hephaestus and passed on through generations of

51 tricksters. Jay Dolmage begins his work on Hephaestus by claiming that views of classical rhetoric and disability have obscured the ways in which people of antiquity have viewed

rhetoric and the disabled body. Dolmage strives to show that Hephaestus is a

manifestation of bodily imperfection, of disability, and that this was in fact celebrated.

He calls upon the disabled god’s physical abnormality, his “dragging foot,” and how “his extraordinary body was positively allied with his cunning mind, and both were then

further allied with the symbolic movements and strategies of specific animal,” those being octopus and crab. For Hephaestus, his bodily difference is directly related to his cunning, different way of thinking. The lateral movement of his physicality informs the

rhetoric he uses. He was heralded for his “distinctive characteristic of being endowed

with a double and divergent orientation” (156). This “divergent” distinction, the rhetorical one, is described as mētis. The word mētis means wise and wily intelligence.

Simply put, Dolmage argues that in the case of Hephaestus, the word means “cunning, adaptive, embodied intelligence” (156).

Mētis, Dolmage says, “is always affiliated with crafty figures that display a somatic cunning or bodily intelligence…it is enacted as flair, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, cleverness, opportunism, and experience” (156). Mētis is very much of a specific time and place and is informed by the body, what Dolmage terms “the corporeality of mētis” (157). “It is timely, flexible, and practical. Mētis is an embodied,

responsive act that is the instant of art; therefore, it always introduces newness of foreignness” (158). As such, the practicing of mētis requires “a wide array of practical

52 skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment” (158). For Hephaestus, god of metallurgy, constant change is a profession. His sideways foot informs his sideways, fresh perception of the world, and allows him to cunningly slip through it. But mētis is not without lofty implications, since

it “resists simplification into deductive principles…it lies in that large space between the realm of genius, to which no formula can apply, and the realm of codified knowledge”

158). Naturally, such a rhetoric could link disability with suspicion, and this is sometimes

the case. But Dolmage takes pains to show that more often mētis is celebrated for its

innovation instead of dismissed for its suspect origins. Thus, mētis sometimes furthers suspicions of disabled bodies, but it also reveals disabled bodies as hosts of an industrious, corporeal intelligence.

To properly utilize mētis, the rhetorician manipulates dissonant language and social order so that he may navigate normative spaces with ease. The rhetorician must possess a “willingness to be open to unexpected ideas” and a “sensitivity for unforeseen possibilities.” He must have “a positive attitude towards serendipity…mētis thus assumes a partial abandonment of control – that is, it involves not assuming oneself to be the agent of every solution, or the cause of each decision” (161). This establishes a relationship between improvisation and living with a disabled body. Finally, and perhaps most notably, mētis is morally, ethically ambiguous, and there often seems to be

duplicity to the ends it can achieve. Dolmage says it is “distinguished – except quite

53 artificially – from deception and mendacity.” Mētis can be a powerful tool for “control

and repression” (161).

For Hephaestus to accomplish all of this, his disability is his ability. His physical difference is responsible for his rhetorical movement across time and space. It is not

overcoming, in the sentimental sense; it is a cunning maneuverability that accepts an openness to different thinking, the foundation for which was created by disability.

Disability leads to mētis by offering the wielder what Garland-Thomson calls a “sitpoint theory.” That is, the disabled body is given a unique vantage point of the world that allows for the “forging [of] something practical out of these possibilities…changing the world as we move through it” (149). For Hephaestus, lateral movement created by his impairment led to the development of his rhetorical power. So if it is overcoming, it is a deceptive, devious one, much like the body that Hephaestus was given. It is an ingenious, utilitarian employment of embodied rhetoric, one that helps explains the

motivations and “different” decisions of the judge, though his is a menacing mētis, an exploitation for a higher, war-hungry purpose.

“T h e t hre ad of ord er ” : The judge as Mēt is Rhetorician

The judge celebrates himself. He smiles during violence, like when he murders two puppies at the river. He dances, like when he frenetically proclaims his immortality

after his final encounter with the man (formerly the kid). He plays the fiddle, whipping

crowds into a frenzy with his devilishly impeccable musicality at the end of the novel.

54 Earlier, he stands magnificently naked above his comrades, “immense and pale in the revelations of lightning, striding the perimeter up there and declaiming in the old epic mode” (124). The next morning, the gang discovers a young boy whose “neck had been broke,” the judge’s preferred method of killing. On top of the wall, readers are left to conclude, he was celebrating his pedophilic triumph. Hephaestus was celebrated by

those around him, but the judge, in perverse Whitmanesque fashion, celebrates himself.

But celebration is also respect, and those around the judge spread his reputation.

Perhaps his biggest detractor, Tobin, more than most, feels compelled to preach on the

judge. By doing so, he plays into the mystique of the judge, since he is actually celebrating his monstrous reputation. People gossip about Holden’s cunning maneuverability, his quick wit, and his massive strength. Like the devil of folklore, he is celebrated through fables of crafty misdeeds. But, like Hephaestus, he is venerated for

his innovation. The line between demonization and respect is thin, just like Hephaestus was alternately shunned and revered for his industriousness and sheer physical power.

In his most vicious moments, the judge exposes his full body invitingly, as if in mockery

and self-admiration of his rhetorical and physically dominant skill. Like Hephaestus

before him, the judge is a known trickster, though the judge’s is a purely sinister

celebration. Finally underlying this power is the judge’s body and intellect. His surplus of both is what makes him super-abled.

Like the disabled god, the judge’s rhetorical force is born in his physical appearance, though it wouldn’t be fair to associate the judge an animal akin to crab and

55 octopi. His rhetorical and physical movements are certainly lateral, as he moves

effortlessly along the desert landscape and among different civilizations and cultures.

He seems to slip at will across lateral spaces, as in the novel's beginning, when he causes

the crowd to storm the pastor – for no other reason, seemingly, than because he can. In his address to the revival-goers, the judge begins by establishing legal evidence of the

minister's fraudulence, saying that “he holds no papers of divinity from any institution . .

. he is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has usurped.” He builds credibility by citing the specific states in which the minister is wanted. After

establishing legal precedence, the judge appeals to the emotions of his audience by

citing several of the minister's bestial offenses, including child rape and “congress with a

goat” (7). The judge uses traditional modes of persuasion – ethos and pathos – to enrage the passions of his audience. He then beats the crowd to the nearest bar. As the

crowd stumbles and people are “trampled underfoot in the mud,” the judge is already at the tavern, mysteriously free of mud (8).

Similarly, the judge's intellect reaches separate, otherworldly spheres, as reflected by those around him. He speaks a variety of languages and is proficient in various and diverse practices; his knowledge covers a wide, lateral swath of subjects. He

uses his fluency in Spanish and deep understanding of law, classical and contemporary,

to lull Sergeant Aguilar away from violence (89). With the governor of Chihuahua City,

the judge falls naturally in beside the residing leader, and speaks with the governor in “a tongue no other in that room spoke at all” (176). Whether he is dealing with a hot

56 tempered sergeant or an educated host, the judge slips quietly into the existing

normative structures, deftly displaying his abilities of trickery and organic assimilation.

More than anyone, the judge blurs borders between place, language, class, and race. In spite of his disability – because of his disability – the judge is able to crab-walk through danger and difference. Literally and metaphorically, he moves laterally with innovative

efficiency, ranking him alongside his mythological predecessor as a master of mētis.

However, the judge illustrates an intense vertical movement that is not

associated with Hephaestus. The judge moves up at least as much as he moves side to side. When he celebrates himself, he positions himself high up, as he was seen after the

implied rape and murder of the boy. In the midst of a storm, the judge basks in “the revelations of lightning” (124). While others crowd around a fire, trying to stay warm, the judge stands naked in defiance, not deference, to the storm. Tobin’s story of the judge’s cunning homemade gunpowder trick takes place at the top of a mountain. The judge moves everybody in a counterintuitive direction. When it makes sense to move

laterally away from the enemy, the judge perches the group high up where it seems as if they would be cornered. Of course, this the judge’s mētis – seeing the world differently,

and manipulating normative notions. Physically, the judge stands abnormally taller than other people. While Hephaestus’ visible abnormality was his outward pointing foot, the

judge’s abnormality extends upward. He does display lateral dexterity – in a brawl, he

was “like a cat and he sidestepped the man and seized his arm and broke it and picked the man up by his head” (187). He displays a side-to-side nimbleness, but ultimately

57 returns to his strength and vertically raises the man to his height before delivering the

death blow. Just as Hephaestus’s lateral movement manifested rhetorically, in cunning,

evasive trickery, the judge’s physical difference moves him upward, physically and mentally. Physically, he is naturally guided, in his moments of particularly potent mētis,

upward, as seen in the gunpowder scene, in the aftermath of the boy's rape and murder, and at the close of the novel, when he dances upward and upward. Mentally, he is given to moments of intense philosophical contemplation. The judge’s intense

meanderings may simply serve his rhetorical means and not signify his personal – or the

novel’s – individual philosophy. But they are too frequent, too eloquent, to be hollow.

The judge is similar to Hephaestus in his employment of mētis, but he combines lateral cunning with vertical power.

Just as the mētis rhetorician must possess a “willingness to be open to unexpected ideas,” “a sensitivity to unforeseen possibilities,” and a “partial abandonment of control,” the judge is flexible, simply along for the ride (Dolmage 162).

He does not lead the group, except when he is called upon or feels moved to do so. In most respects, Glanton is leader and the gang is named for him. The judge is presented as the number two man. It is an interesting notion that the judge should play second fiddle given his super-abilities, but then again, the judge sees the world from a different

angle. Perhaps the world is more easily manipulated when approached through proxy,

or maybe the judge appreciates divesting blame and attention to another person. At any

rate, the judge allows events to unfold, keeping his hands off until something crosses his

58 path. As he says, “the man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken of the world and it is only by

such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate” (208).

The judge recognizes the interconnectedness of things; he respects the individual thread of the greater tapestry. In a sense, he gives himself up to the intricacy of the universe,

choosing to catalogue the world one piece at a time. He is open to serendipity, even

though it seems strangely staged when it happens. Again, though, the judge extends the

bounds of mētis. While the judge accepts events and does not attempt to be “the agent of every solution,” he does believe he knows the solution. Recall his moments of intense, vertical thinking, and his “orchestration of an event,” a war dance that will feature only one “true dancer,” who has “offered up himself entire to the blood of war”

(345). Only by offering himself up to the threads of the world is he able to control it. The

judge may resemble the mētis rhetorician in his willingness to study individual threads,

but he moves vertically past his rhetoric and becomes the things on which the entire

tapestry hangs. Weaving a tapestry requires vertical and horizontal threads. Of course,

the judge navigates with a bastardized, distorted mētis, so even his proclamations are

subject.

sWith thi willingness, the judge manipulates the dissonance of language,

symbolism – any social order – and, like Hephaestus, he moves seamlessly, effortlessly through normative spaces. Through a combination of codified knowledge and the

philosophical realms, the judge can manipulate the world. The judge’s rhetoric prevents

59 gunfights, quells uprisings, or, when he prefers, begins gunfights and spurs uprisings. He

uses language to exploit otherwise absurd social structures. For example, when he is disarming the Mexican guards after Glanton has killed animals, the judge uses obscure

classical and judicial language – in the narrator's words, “he adduced for their consideration references to the children of Ham, the lost tribes of Israelites, certain passages from Greek poets” (88-9) – and his linguistic prowess – “he began a laborious introduction in Spanish” (88) – to diffuse the situation. Conversely, he preys on the

juxtaposition of saint and devil when he sets loose the fears of the revival-goers on an innocent minister. The judge represents the extreme example of the trickster that

“reveals the impulse toward transgression, rebellion, a freeing form that which, if not seen through, would oppress us.” Dolmage notes that Hephaestus, “instead of reaffirming the unity of the hegemonic group based upon a narrow view of ability, he

may have dissolved it – he may have allowed the monologue of unity to morph into a polyphony” (186). For Hephaestus, such a dissolving is admirable, because it creates

harmony out of different parts. For the judge, though, it is self-serving. He is able to turn the normative on itself, to wield power structures to his own ends, not to create

harmony but to foster dissonance.

A final feature of the mētis rhetorician is moral, ethical ambiguity. Another

classical example of mētis is Odysseus. I invoke Odysseus here to illustrate the various ends mētis can achieve. Because myths of Hephaestus are varied and contradictory, it

helps to utilize a mētis rhetorician who has a straightforward, singular objective.

60 Odysseus uses his trickery to achieve his higher, meaningful end. There is hardly anything ambiguous about the ferocity and discomforting results of the judge’s trickery.

The artificial and thin line between mētis and deception is erased, as the judge freely

wields his graceful mendacity, unconcerned – or actively working against – moral or

ethical conventions. Furthermore, just as Odysseus’ cunning moved him closer to a higher end, so too does the judge use his mētis to get ever closer to his goal, though his is far more ambiguous, ambitious, vertical. There is some duplicity in the acceptance of his skills. Tobin remarks, after the judge saves the gang with his impromptu, homemade

gunpowder, “and so I thought the judge had been sent among us for a curse. And yet he proved me wrong. At the time he did. I’m of two minds now” (137). Tobin remarks on the ambiguityof his feelings towards the judge. Tobin, more than anybody, sees the

underbelly of the judge’s heroics; he sees, however simply, the horrible ends the judge has in mind. His end is a judge-centered, war-made world, if we take his words at face

value. Either way, his actions suggest, and his rhetoric supports, a bleak and violent

result of his mētis.

Looking at the myths of Hephaestus, Dolmage shows the representations of the

disabled god "did not always reaffirm and reinscribe this difference as deficit." Instead,

Hephaestus’s role in myth yields an often contradictory picture – a complexity that challenges simple constructions, reductions, or dismissals of his important role in history. The confusion and the flexibility of norms, as applied to and embodied by Hephaestus, suggest that Greek society did not understand disability as simply as our history might suggest. (168)

61 Finally, just as Hephaestus constitutes a re-evaluation of classic normative structures,

the judge suggests that the world of Blood Meridian is not as unsophisticated or clear- cut as it may seem in the towns that the gang pass through. Although the civilizations isolate and ignore the disabled body and even though the scalp-hunters read disability

on simple physical, utilitarian terms, the judge is an example of physical difference as a powerful tool. Although the judge uses his embodied rhetoric for devious, horrible purposes, he does set a similar example as Hephaestus in showing a character that uses

social norms for their own ends, that understands normative power enough to wield it.

In a perverted way, the judge is rare example of someone with a firm understanding of

social structures and a unique enough view to subvert them. The link between his massive, infantile body, his formidable intellect, and his lust for the destruction of similarly infantile bodies, suggests that the trickery of the judge is best read as an embodied rhetoric. This reading sees his cunning as coming from and powered by his body. McCarthy saw something awful in Chamberlain’s Holden. The judge’s suggestion of disability comes to embody his super-ability. McCarthy exaggerated the physical traits, did the same to his intellect creating a super-abled monster, a practitioner of

crafty mētis, which he would exploit and celebrate for higher, horrible purposes.

62 CHAPTER IV

“SEE THE WILD MAN TWO BITS”: JAMES ROBERTS, IDIOCY, AND PERSONHOOD

Scholars do not talk about the idiot, a character who appears seemingly from

nowhere after three quarters of the book. He has a name, James Roberts, but he is

almost never called by it in the novel. He sits by the edge of the fire, watching, drooling.

In the world of the novel, he is entertainment, luggage, a weight to be carried. He recedes into the fabric of the story. He is likewise avoided in scholarship. However, once he appears in the text, he is present until very near the end of the novel. Why does

McCarthy include this character? Why saddle the gang with a dependent, disabled

person? Is he even a person? Why pair the super-abled judge with a companion that the

narrator sees as a physically disabled, feebleminded idiot? Scholars have consistently avoided such questions, treating James Roberts as an untouched, uninteresting feature of a colossally more interesting landscape. Yet when the judge hunts the kid and Tobin,

James Roberts is there. When the scalp hunters occupy and operate their ferry venture

and when they are brutally thwarted by neighboring Yumas, Roberts is always already nearby, watching. The novel tells us that he is important. If we can look up at the

monstrous judge and marvel at his philosophical queries, we must also look down to his

side, where Roberts stoops and stares. The way we read James Roberts directly affects 63 the way we read that judge and the kid. But he is also more than a mirror, more than a peripheral sideshow to the main characters. James Roberts is a historically engaging, subversive, and ambiguously rich character that, in the novel and interpretation, has a mind of his own.

To properly position James Roberts contextually and textually, I will be looking

closely at history and literature. Specifically, I compare James Roberts’s journey and eventual liberation to the historically typical treatment of idiocy in 19th century

America5. This leads to an interpretation of James Roberts that necessarily questions the

novel’s concept of personhood in general. Because James Roberts comes close to being portrayed like someone who has attained personhood, but not close enough. I conclude

that language is a fundamental component of determining personhood and that James

Roberts lacks this while others have language but lack physicality.

“I th in k h e was an imbecile” : James Roberts and the History of American Idiocy

The events of Blood Meridian take place between 1849 and 1850. The state of mental disability treatment in the United States at the time, coupled with the journey of

James Roberts, offers important insight into the historical authenticity of the character,

and into the ways that the frontier differed from the rest of the country regarding the

treatment of mental disability. As James Trent Jr. notes, “mental retardation is a construction whose changing meaning is shaped both by individuals who initiate and

5 As with physical disability discussed in Chapter 1, my sources for the history of idiocy do not mention Hispanic treatment, nor is such research available. Like Chapter 1, I am aware of singular focus on American history. 64 administer policies, programs, and practices, and by the social context to which these

individuals are responding” (2). This claim can be stretched back in time to the historical period of Blood Meridian. Roberts’ journey across the United States to the frontier – and his subsequent embrace by the judge – is an intense lesson in social construction.

Roberts is helpless. Every move he is allowed to make, every step he takes – save for a few significant ones – is dictated by the social and historical context that surrounds him.

Mainly using James W. Trent’s Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental

Retardation in the United States, I show that Roberts’ journey begins as an illustration of the prevailing attitudes towards the mentally disabled, before he succumbs purely to the individual whims of the novel’s characters.

Trent begins his history of the American feebleminded by asserting that post- revolutionary idiocy was a family affair. A popular definition from around the time Blood

Meridian is set comes from Hervey Wilbur, an American “reformer” who built on

European models of idiocy. He says that “at the basis of all our efforts lies the principle that the human attributes of intelligence, sensitivity, and will are not absolutely wanting

in an idiot, but dormant and underdeveloped” (qtd. in Trent 17). Wilbur added pathology to the moral paradigm that had been employed in Europe. Furthermore,

Wilbur categorized idiocy into different categories, ranging from “simulative idiocy,” those whose development was merely retarded and could be properly and permanently fixed, to “incurables,” those who were lucky to successfully engage in any level of education. So the development of an American definition of idiocy “took into account

65 not only its moral and functional dimensions, but also its pathological, typological, and degenerative properties” (16).

Physically disabled idiots received primary care from members of their

immediate and extended family. If a family broke down, Trent says, “idiots unable to care for themselves were placed with neighbors or in almshouses, and more able simpletons, especially those capable of breaking the law, might find themselves in local jails” (7). Idiots were sometimes teased, sometimes viewed with disgust, but always

pitied and never feared. Following the Panic of 1819, economic and social pressures changed the view of the mentally disabled from sympathy and benevolence to anxiety

and fear. This marked the invention of American idiocy, wherein the feebleminded were

lumped in to a new class including both “worthy dependents (widows, orphans, and

disabled people) and unworthy dependents (the unemployed and criminals)” (10). This

shifted the attention on idiots from the family and community to the society and the

nation. In essence, the local idiot went national. Spearheaded by American physicians who had travelled abroad and seen the “successes” of European institutions, wholesale boarding of the feebleminded gained swift traction. By 1850, physicians and legislators toured the United States, displaying “successfully rehabilitated” idiots in an effort to establish more schools for them. Also involved in this mid-century push, and an obvious feature of physician-sponsored institutionalization, was the medicalization of idiocy.

Feeblemindedness was no longer a moral, functional problem, but a pathological one.

Competing and conflicting definitions, treatments, and hierarchies poured in, of which

66 there seemed to be an agreement of a few features. Reformers – so the doctors of feeblemindedness are called – associated idiocy with “degenerative and polymorphous heredity” (18). That is, sins of the father were inextricably linked with idiocy of their

offspring. Naturally, the pathology of feeblemindedness maintained its relationship with morality; bad deeds and immorality breed like a disease, one that is responsible for the

infirmities of children. A final feature of idiocy at this time was performance. While not

advertised explicitly as entertainment, reformers nevertheless rarely addressed an audience without a small parade of idiots. These doctors proudly displayed their

successes, former driveling cases that are now able to read, write, and freely move.

They reminded their audiences of inaction, and explicitly drew attention to what they

saw as link between idiocy, moral degeneration, and the threat of rampant

feeblemindedness.

In many ways, James Roberts’s journey is a microcosm for the larger, American shift in feebleminded ideology. The history of James is recounted secondhand. Cloyce,

his brother and “owner,” says that James was left to him after their mother died.

Clearly, James and his family were operating in the mold of the local idiot, with James as the dependent offspring that relies on familial caretaking, and, after the dissolution of that family, gets passed to the nearest member. Of course, Cloyce was a poor choice,

and the method of transportation that delivered James to his brother was equally distasteful: “They shipped him to me. Joplin Missouri. Just put him in a box and shipped him. Took five weeks. Didn’t bother him a bit. I opened up the box and there he set”

67 (248). It is clear that Cloyce began his voyeuristic sideshow attraction shortly after, and the two brothers took their show on the road, but not with impunity. Cloyce offers an

important bit of personal history that places James in the larger framework of American idiocy attitudes. When warned of being tarred and feathered in California, Cloyce

replies:

I’ve been that. State of Arkansas. Claimed I’d given him something. Drugged him. They took him off and waited for him to get better but of course he didnt do it. They had a special preacher come and pray over him. Finally I got him back. I could have been somebody wasnt for him. (249)

This constitutes the most detailed account of Cloyce and James’ history. However short,

Cloyce’s brief history includes historical detail that seems to agree with Trent’s rendering of idiocy in American history.

It is unclear what year Cloyce was tarred and feathered, but it definitely fell within the time period Trent names as the period of medicalization and institutionalization of feebleminded people. Such a shift is reflected in the Arkansan treatment of Cloyce. Idiocy had become a community problem. It became the role of the larger public to seek out, pathologize, and institutionalize the feebleminded population. Cloyce’s summation that the community “took him off and waited for him to get better” is ample evidence that the powers that be had perhaps seen the

“success” stories of mental physicians and adopted the relocation, boarding, and

education of the mentally disabled. As Cloyce candidly points out, “of course he didnt do it.” The institution didn’t work, and the marriage between medicine and morality is

68 completed by bringing in a “special” preacher. A deviation from the long-term

incarceration of the mentally disabled, Cloyce “got him back.” Perhaps the case was too far gone. Perhaps the pathological definition did not mesh with someone of James’ extreme case. At any rate, Cloyce again adopts the familial caretaking of James,

resuming the former treatment method for the local idiot. His lament that he “could have been somebody wasnt for him” underscores the perseverance of familial duty despite a shift towards community pathology.

But Cloyce takes his familial duty a step further – not a step forward; it is not a positive move– by showcasing his totally disabled brother. Rationally speaking, this move makes sense. Saddled with a dependent, and sandwiched geographically between

Arkansas and California – places that have or may punish him for displaying his brother–

Cloyce decides that his burden should be his monetary gain. In a perverse way, Cloyce’s display of James mocks the time period’s not-so-different showcasing of reformed idiots, except in Cloyce and James’ case, it is distrustful of that system. Perhaps it

showcases the futility of such physicians in the face of overwhelming disability. Perhaps it shows that families are not comfortable with a system that strips them of their former

role in caring for idiocy, especially on the frontier, where distance and necessity

separates them from the larger developments of civilization. Here is a man so disabled

that even the system tasked with removing, teaching, and rehabilitating him has spit him back out. Yet he survives. This totally helpless man is allowed to live, travel, and

69 becomes both a plaything and a moneymaker. In a perverse way, he fares better than most others with disabled bodies in the novel.

How is it that the most extreme case of disability in the novel seems better fitted for survival than his more able counterparts? Logistically, the answer is money and the

extremity of his disability. James Roberts is such an extreme case that he is a spectacle.

Instead of ostracizing him to the fringes of town, he is put on display in the middle of it.

He is so disabled people will pay “two bits” just to look at him. At a certain point, it seems, disability can become so unusually extreme that it transcends usual attitudes

and becomes a spectacle and investment. Consider Glanton’s exchange with Cloyce.

Cloyce is seeking safe passage to California where he hopes he may charge more for his human exhibit. Glanton does show concern for the previously established ability- checklist; he asks, “How do you aim to haul him?” (244). But the prospect of money,

coupled with the overwhelming intensity of James’ disability, warrants the effort. For a scalp hunter, disability means worthlessness; it is better to be dead. But a disability of

James’ caliber shifts the definition of disability from worthless person to worthwhile property. James becomes another object the gang must haul. He has value as a spectacle, and his brother is paying for his transport. And besides, James Roberts lacks the mental and language faculties necessary to object or agree, so there is no battle of agency for Cloyce and Glanton; they may do as they wish. Perversely, if not ingeniously,

they flip the typical disability system on its head. Instead of squashing out disability,

70 they literally raise him up in a cage as an object for viewing. They make money on what

typically holds no value.

James Roberts has never been fully abled. He is not Toadvine, who persevered

through disability and now makes his living disabling others. He is not Shelby, who is disabled beyond usefulness. James Roberts was born physically and mentally disabled,

to the point of being interesting to those who are able. He is of the group Wilbur

deemed “incurable.” Perhaps it is the novelty of his appearance and grotesqueness of his actions that make him attractive as a spectacle. It is one thing to fall from grace and become useless. It is one thing to survive disability and wear the scars. It is quite

another thing to have always been disabled, and that difference makes James Roberts valuable.

“ What do you f igure t o do wit h that t hing?” : James Roberts and Literary Idiocy

I have offered an historical framework for James Roberts that illustrates how

McCarthy situates the character within and deviates from the era's larger treatment of

the feebleminded. I will now turn to the literary representation of idiocy and how

McCarthy develops and distorts previously established trends. My main source for this section is Martin Halliwell, whose book Images of Idiocy: The Idiot Figure in Modern

Fiction and Film offers fitting material with which to consider McCarthy’s manifestation of idiocy in Blood Meridian. Halliwell begins with the Romantic and Victorian writers’ representations of idiocy, since they “prefigure many of the themes arising in later

71 representations, particularly the ‘look’ and symbolic function of the idiot” (13). Central to these and most subsequent representations of idiocy in literature is "the way in which idiot figures have been constructed to propel narratives in a particular direction or to act as a counterpoint to other characters.” Such a structuralist approach is warranted because the idiot figure usually lacks the agency and mental wherewithal to act meaningfully within a text. Thus, the idiot is “propelled by the action of others.”

Idiots are not characters with personalities; they are figures, objects in the text that

“amplify themes or carry action forward.” However, the idiot figure also lends itself to poststructuralist thinking by exploiting the “complex interactions between reader, text and author.” In this way, narrative prosthesis actually reveals the idiot to be a more open character.

Narrative prosthesis, as defined by Mitchell and Snyder, is the “perpetual discursive dependency on disability” that manifests in literature “as a stock feature of characterization and, second, as an opportunistic metaphorical device” (222). But James

Roberts tells a different story, one that, as Thomas Docherty argues, allows “for the

possibility of change and mobility in the meaning of character” (qtd. in Halliwell 14). For

clear reasons, this analysis of idiocy in literature is particularly germane to modernist and postmodernist sentiments towards character and the inherent fragmentation that

accompanies any figure. The idiot is somehow a truer character because he is not unified. He becomes a curiosity on display in the novel, a curiosity that does highlight

other characters, particularly the judge, but he does not exist for this purpose. James

72 Roberts seems to pay more attention to others than they pay to him, suggesting that the formula is inversed, that those around him actually serve to bolster his characterization. Especially, since he lacks the faculty of audible language, the character

of James Roberts is identified exclusively though his physical actions and corporeal association with the setting and other characters.

Two texts that are especially worth considering in tandem with Blood Meridian are Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and O’Connor’s Wise Blood. McCarthy’s early

Southern Gothic work shows similarities and perhaps indebtedness to O’Connor and

Faulkner, pioneers of Southern Literature. McCarthy’s sense of place and the population of place with marginalized, sometimes grotesque characters could also find a home in the writings of Faulkner and O’Connor. The first is essential because, for better or worse, McCarthy was seen as a disciple of Faulkner, perhaps motivating him to move

west and out from under the shadow of Faulkner.6 The second is notable because, like

McCarthy, O’Connor deals with the grotesque, of which disability is a frequent manifestation. Unlike McCarthy, O’Connor’s work has been considered with disability.

As such, O’Connor offers a critical foundation for literary disability and Faulkner

represents an ever-present figure in McCarthy’s literary genealogy, one who is also concerned with the portrayal of disability in literature.

6 A notable example is the 1965 review of McCarthy’s debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, entitled “Still Another Disciple of William Faulkner” by Orville Prescott. Prescott submits that McCarthy is “sorely handicapped by [his] humble and excessive admiration for William Faulkner.” He cites several characteristics of Faulkner found in the novel as evidence: “the wandering pronouns with no visible antecedents, the recondite vocabulary and coined words; the dense prose packed with elaborate figures of speech; the deliberate ambiguity; the hints and withheld information” (1). 73 Faulkner and O’Connor deviate from the typical mold of idiocy in literature. In

their stories, the feebleminded take center stage and subvert the established tradition of the idiot as a plot mover and character enhancer. Faulkner’s Benjy is a mentally retarded high modernist. Benjy shifts the figure of the idiot from a physical, outside

object to an internal, thinking character. Benjy challenges binaries. He questions the

relationship between language and the outside world. The idiot character becomes a vehicle for Faulkner’s exploration of regional deterioration, family strife, and the like. It

is not clear that Benjy is a mentally retarded character until later sections, that is, until the larger social framework of the novel is revealed. As Halliwell describes it, Benjy’s roars at the end of the novel “conveys the disorientation of a sentient being who cannot

bear to experience anything out of the ordinary and who, like the post-bellum white

South he inhabits, cannot grow up” (23). Hazel Motes in Wise Blood further explores the

regional connections between idiocy and environment, though O’Connor seems to attack the mirage of Southern bonds by evoking idiocy to frustrate enlightenment. If

Benjy is somehow a vehicle of revelation, Hazel is the vehicle that seeks to destroy such revelations by undercutting seriousness with comedy, and by leaving readers with the

incoming darkness of a vacant idiot. Both Benjy and Hazel can inform a reading of James

Roberts in Blood Meridian, where McCarthy toys with the image of the idiot in interesting, if not very redeeming ways.

James Roberts complicates the role of idiocy in literature because he does not

readily fit into the usual model; he is autonomous. Before I compare James Roberts to

74 these more subversive examples, I must apply him to the aforementioned, traditional

mold of idiocy. As a plot mover, it would seem on the surface that McCarthy employs

Roberts in a stock trope, as described by narrative prosthesis. It is true that he doesn’t take actions that matter, that he is always there but is never participating. It is also seems true that he exists only as an appendage of the judge. After the judge saves him

from drowning, perhaps as soon as the judge takes an anthropological interest in him,

James does not exist without the judge; he goes where the judge goes. But, with further

examination, such a singular view of James’ place in the novel is problematic. First, there must be a plot in order for a character to exist solely to move it. In a novel that is comprised of horizontal wandering, a rambling series of vignettes, a character that exists to serve the plot is either impossible or hasn’t done its job. It can be argued that no character exists to serve Blood Meridian's plot, since there is none in a conventional sense. As far as Roberts’ role as an appendage to the judge, there seems to be no moment where his presence facilitates meaningful action. Certainly, one could point to

Tobin’s entreating the kid to “shoot the fool” when speaking of James as a possible moment of plot production, but the moment is a mere consideration. He is not shot,

and the plot is not significantly changed because of James’ presence. In fact, remove the idiot entirely from the novel and nothing is lost save an added pair of travelers, a near

drowning, and a physical attachment involving the already multifaceted judge. This is not to say that James means nothing to the novel. On the contrary, it is liberating that

an idiot could simply exist and be present without having to further a plot. Literarily

75 speaking, James is autonomous; he exists separately from a larger plot, and serves an underappreciated role in it.

As a device that serves to enhance another character, it again seems reasonable

to see James Roberts as only functioning to augment the image of the judge. But here

again the relationship requires unpacking. The moment that weds the two is the judge’s rescue of James from the river. Sarah Borginnis and her fellow women, who appear

briefly and are not associated with the core Glanton gang, seek to free James Roberts of his confines. She scolds Cloyce and it is then that we learn his name. Just before the

women run to gather cleaning materials, Cloyce says “mam,” before Sarah continues her preparations. It seems that Cloyce is trying to save them the trouble, trying to explain that cleaning him and treating him like a human has been tried and will not work; it is

Arkansas all over again. But they clean him and burn his cage. They dress him up, call him by name, and when he is bathed in the river, “he peered past her at the water, then he reached for her” (268). There is an ambiguous moment wherein Sarah, James, and the water are all connected. Sarah delivers James in the river. As his cage burns, the

women agree that James knows what is happening, and the narrator, for the first time,

refers to James as the “grown man that he was” (269). Snugly swaddled, James is no sooner laid to bed then he was again naked and entering the water, and “Before the

river reached much past his waist he’d lost his footing and sunk from sight.” It is then that the judge, also naked, comes across the scene and saves James Roberts, like “a birth scene or a baptism or some ritual not yet inaugurated into any canon” (270).

76 The chapter is essential to understanding James Roberts, and there are several ways to read it. First, and most obvious, is that James should not have been freed. His feeble mind was connected with the water and he felt a need to return. His nearly

drowning was an accident. Or he simply wandered and unluckily fell into the river. Next,

Sarah’s deliverance of James could be read as the beginning of James’ agency, and, now endowed with freedom, he sought to end his life in the place where he was delivered. In this reading, his near-drowning was a failed suicide attempt. Or he always had his agency and was only waiting for the freedom of mobility to kill himself. Evidence for the

latter reading can be found in his soft hoot that “passed from him like a gift that was also needed so that no sound of it echoed back,” just before he enters the river (270).

The hoot could be his farewell, his attempt at announcing his departure. Before arriving

at the shore, he pauses and tests the air, as if he is finding his way back to the water. At

any rate, he is saved – or foiled – by the judge. The nurturing of Sarah and James’ deliverance is usurped by “the great midwife.” The narrator's way of referencing the judge offers options for interpretation. It could be a birth scene signaling the judge’s adoption of James. It could be a baptism that converts James to the judge’s religion of war. Still, it could be “some other ritual not yet inaugurated into any canon.” What is clear is that James, in this moment, is most certainly inaugurated into the judge’s inner circle. Whatever deliverance Sarah offers James, whatever agency he had or was given,

he becomes wedded to the judge for the remainder of his time in the novel.

77 Given the judge’s action of pulling James out of water and saving his life – whether it was welcome or not – it is reasonable to think of James as his sidekick or

character enhancer for the rest of the novel. The judge saved him and now he serves

the judge. However, certain moments suggest that James retains enough agency to choose to be at the judge’s side. For example, after the Yumas attack the ferry operation, they found “the idiot and a girl of perhaps twelve years cowering naked in the floor. Behind them also naked stood the judge.” The judge shoots the Yumas with the howitzer and the end of the scene describes “the idiot, who reached just to [the judge's] waist, [as] stuck close to his side, and together they entered the wood at the

base of the hill and disappeared from sight” (286-87). James is not forcefully tied to the

judge. Syntactically, “the idiot” is the one choosing to be “stuck close to his side.”

Furthermore, they escape “together.” The judge is not dragging or carrying him; he is not forcefully moving him. They harmoniously escape together. In this moment the two resemble a shark and its passenger fish. The judge gets to play out his fantasies with an uncomplaining victim while James can tag alongside the body that protects him; it is a

symbiotic relationship. For James, it is better to be behind the shark’s fin when he feeds then to be the one that is fed upon. In this reading, James Roberts is not merely an appendage or tentacle of the judge, he is a consenting associate.

So if James Roberts appears to fit and then complicate the narrative prosthetic image of idiocy, how does he stack up against other innovative idiots such as Benjy and

Hazel? Since he does not occupy a central position in the narrative, James Roberts

78 obviously does not mirror the modernist mouthpiece of Benjy or the tone-setting of

Hazel, but he does combine important characteristics of the two. Namely, James may

not be able to speak, but he sees; he is always gazing. Like Benjy, James Roberts absorbs

the world around him. Unlike Benjy, the novel does not give James a voice; he does not have language. He shares bodily traits with other humans, but he lacks the expressive

faculty of language that is essential to the human category. Also, his grotesque portrayal

undercuts the seriousness of his character, or renders it just as serious as other

grotesque images in the novel. These qualities play out ambiguously, leaving an unclear

of what exactly James sees and how he interprets the world around him.

The idiot stares. If there is one consistent action he takes, however much agency

he might have in the action, it is his frequent and intense gaze. After being picked up,

James spends most his time watching: “the idiot clutched the poles and watched the land pass in silence” (253). This becomes indicative of what James does; he sees but does not speak. James is like the narrator, who only relates what is visible, he says, “The eyes of the dog and of the idiot and certain other men glowing red as coals in their heads where they turned” (255). In this moment, the idiot is sandwiched somewhere between an animal and “certain other men.” His position is established somewhere between animalism and agency. Again, the text suggests that he sees something

between innate, animalistic urge and the human observance. The next passage says still more about James’ humanity, for he is among those that “watched the fire which does contain something of men themselves inasmuch as they are less without it and are

79 divided from their origins and are exiles. For each fire is all fires, the first fire and last

ever to be” (255). So fire is a community creator. In the novel it represents shared humanity and the inherent and ubiquitous wandering of all mankind. Fire casts a light

on the group and allows for “optical democracy,” an equal vision of things, one that

James Roberts participates in and seems to intensely advocate for.

This is a nice sentiment for James Roberts, who, more than any other character

is associated with fire. He is seen, “watching the fire tirelessly” (254). Even when confined to his cage, on the outskirts of camp, “the idiot watched from his cage at the edge of the light” (259). And he does more than just stare at the fire; the narrator,

labeling him as it, tells us, “it stood leaning in its collar with its hands outheld as if it yearned for the flames” (263). There is no certainty in whether he does in fact yearn for the flames or if it merely appears that he does. His gaze gets further complicated when

“Glanton’s dog rose and sat watching it and the idiot swayed and drooled with its dull eyes falsely brightened by the fire” (263). The “it” the dog watches is James; it is not participating in the shared humanity of fire. But though James sees the fire, they are

“dull eyes” and they are only “falsely” brightened.

When Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes about the disparaging effects of staring, she is speaking about the majority staring at a marginalized group. The group

Garland-Thomson and I are both dealing with is the disabled, but James Roberts inverts the process. In addition, perhaps in spite, of being stared at by able-bodies, James

Roberts stares back. He meets the gaze of the oppressive, marginalizing group. Just as

80 the kid establishes a meaningful, productive gaze on his fallen, disabled comrades,

James Roberts establishes an intense, meaningful gaze from his own perspective.

Garland-Thomson offers a neologism for this, sitpoint theory, a vantage point “that interrogates the ableist assumptions underlying the notion of standpoint theory”

(“Integrating Disability 21). Just as the kid’s gaze is important because it questions normative mechanisms and suggests, through vision, possible reformation, so too does

James Roberts’s gaze see beyond normative culture. Finally, just as the kid’s gaze contributed to the egalitarian vision of an “optical democracy,” so too does Roberts’s unique angle of vision contribute to the equal perception of visible things.

After the drowning scene, the judge “gathered the naked and sobbing fool into his arms and carried it up into the camp and restored it among its fellows” (270). In this moment, James is included with the gang. The judge restores him to his “fellows,” his equals, his former owners. Pronominally, however, James is still distinguished as “it.”

The drowning scene does not alter this distinction. After the scene and until his exit,

James Roberts is still consistently referred to as “it.” Perhaps the narrator’s phrase, “its fellows,” lowers Glanton and his men to a more animalistic, bestial level. What it clear, though, is that despite the implied fellowship, James is not presented as a fellow

human. Still, James is presented as something more than an animal. He is human insofar

as he recognizes and can participate, however crudely, in the community of fire.

However seriously we take James’ visual connection with fire and consequent

humanity, he is continuously undercut by the grotesque. When the gang first meets

81 James, he is presented as “small and misshapen and his face was smeared with feces and he sat peering at them with dull hostility silently chewing a turd” (243). If the narrator judges correctly, James sees the gang with hostility, however dull. But the

possibility of emotive response is immediately undercut by the grotesque image of

James eating his own feces. Another example has “the idiot clinging to the bars and calling hoarsely after the sun like some queer unruly god abducted from a race of degenerates” (262). Again, the possibility of insight – in this case, a cosmic knowing – is undercut by his association with “a race of degenerates.” Even if he is a god, he is an unruly one from a primitive, unnamed culture. In non-specific language, the possibility

of James’ cosmic association with the sun and fire is merely suggested by “some” vague simile. James’ potential consciousness is continuously undermined by his grotesque

appearance. For James, it is all or nothing. Either he possesses a connection with all of humanity via fire, or he is a degenerate idiot covered in his own filth. In this way, there

is a suggestion of a Benjy-esque, objective filter, but it is one that is, like Hazel Motes,

called into question by his grotesque appearance. If he does see something in the

flames, he can only ever yearn for it. If there is a brightness in his eyes, it is falsely illuminated.

‘Amo n g it s f ello ws’: D efin in g Personhood

James Roberts begs the ultimate question of the novel: what constitutes a person in Blood Meridian? Previously, I have determined that, to be considered a person

82 in the novel, an individual must be capable of taking violent action, of riding a horse,

scalping another person, and living on the move. But if it is merely actions that

determine personhood, James Roberts would be considered one, albeit an extremely

disabled one. He reaches for flames, latches onto the judge, and croaks after the sun. He

gets up and walks into the water; he takes action. Yet he is seen as an object in the

novel. Pronominally, James is not a person. Glanton asks, “is that thing yours?” (243),

“what do you aim to do with that thing?” and “you let women see that thing?” (244).

The leader of the able-bodied men consistently identifies James as an object. There is a demarcation between personhood and humanity.

Personhood requires language. James Roberts croaks at the sun, but he can’t speak to it. He reaches, yearns for the flames and for Sarah, but can’t communicate. As primitive as people seem, the faculty of language is nevertheless a prerequisite. Before

Glanton and his men seize the doctor’s ferry operation, “the idiot rose in his cage and seized the bars and commenced hooting as if he’d warn the doctor back” (265). In this, perhaps James’ clearest moment of lucidity, he cannot communicate with the doctor.

Mere action, seizing bars, and unformed sounds, hooting, are not enough to communicate. Benjy qualifies, since, however experimentally, language is used to narrate his perceptions. The judge speaks multiple languages and has a wide and varied way of delivering his words; he is more than human. The kid is conspicuously unillustrated during much of the gang’s depravity, but in his most human moments, he

speaks, as with Sloat. Babies are human but not persons; they hang from a tree. In a

83 novel where nobody is treated like a human, to be a person requires language. This is how James is perceived by people in the novel, as something less than a person.

If James if not a person, why is he linked so closely with the judge? Simply considered, James is a plaything for the depravity of the judge. James’ misshapen form and lack of language makes him easy and controllable prey for the predatory and control-seeking judge. Yet the novel links them, in a passage notable for its possible self- reference and for linking the extremes of ability:

It was the judge and the imbecile. They were both of them naked and they neared through the desert dawn like beings of a mode little more than tangential to the world at large, their figures now quick with clarity and now fugitive in the strangeness of that same light. Like things whose very portent renders them ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed. (294)

McCarthy links two extremes of ability: super-ability and disability. In this passage, the

two are seen in the “same light.” Again, light allows for an “optical democracy.” The things they signal, their “portent,” is unknowable, though it clear that they represent peripheral beings, “tangential to the world at large.” They are both extreme exaggerations of ability, but their meanings are “dimmed.” McCarthy seems to anticipate great meaning in their connection, they are “charged” with it, and purposefully eludes interpretation. What is clear is that James is included in the

ambiguous meaning. For all the judge’s pontification, silent Roberts shares his meaning.

The two figures are finally and totally separated from the kid and his able-bodied comrades, and the super-abled and completely disabled are linked in contrast with the abled. Whatever meaning is associated with the judge, it is shared with James. Even 84 though one is physically and mentally superior, both are “at the very extremes of exile”

(294). The judge and James each reside on a different end of the same ableist spectrum.

One is disabled and lacks language, he is somehow lower than human, while the other is super-abled. He excels physically and linguistically; he is somehow more than human.

85 CHAPTER V

CONCLUSION

You may have noticed that I have been incongruous with nomenclature. I call

Judge Holden the judge but I call the idiot James Roberts. The first is understandable, I

think, because the judge is how McCarthy typically refers to Holden in Blood Meridian's

text. The second is tricky, since McCarthy's narrator refers to James Roberts with a variety of derisive terms, such as "the idiot" or "the imbecile" – anything but his name.

My reason for this is twofold. First, and most practically, the judge Holden of Samuel

Chamberlain’s historical account of scalp hunters is the basis for McCarthy’s judge, but

they are not the same. While they share similarities – enough to make it clear that more

than just his name was adapted – McCarthy extrapolates and sometimes exaggerates

Chamberlain’s Holden. Thus, I call McCarthy’s Holden the judge to distinguish him from his historical antecedent. Furthermore, Holden is most frequently referred to as the

judge in the novel, so my distinct use of that title utilizes the standard practice set forth by McCarthy, though scholarship tends to call him Judge Holden. However, I refer to the

idiot as James Roberts, even though his given name is used briefly and inconsistently.

There is a similarly practical reason for this distinction. Namely, Blood Meridian’s idiot

86 does not have a historical precursor in Chamberlain's account. Instead, James Roberts can only be contextualized in relation to other people outside the text labeled “idiots” in his time period. As a result, the chapter dealing with Roberts contains a wider selection of idiots than Holden’s chapter contained judges. I refer generally to idiocy and name

other historical and literary idiots. Thus, using the name James Roberts serves to distinguish between the idiot of the novel and idiots from history and other works.

James Roberts is the idiot of Blood Meridian.

My second reason for distinguishing the characters thusly coincides with the

notion of personhood that develops within this thesis. Like Whitman, the judge is vast

and contains multitudes. He is not Chamberlain’s Holden who is gigantic and dominating

but limited in time and space. He is the semi-omniscient, always present, linguistic,

anthropological genius who is hell bent on domination. In a sense, he is the judge of mankind, or at least the mankind presented in the novel. His super-ability suggests that

he is more than human, at least by the standards set up by the novel. On the other

extreme, James Roberts, as I have shown, is not treated like a person by most of the

characters in the novel. However, he is given moments of agency, ones that question his position as a simple, unthinking brute. I call him by his name to suggest his personhood,

to make a case for his humanity, though it might sound contrary, given his invisibility in

the scholarship. The judge, on the other hand, is more than human, more than Holden.

Speaking of titles, the kid becomes "the man" by the end of the novel. Again,

there is a practical reason for the switch: he has grown older. The distinction between

87 kid and man marks the passage of time. It signals his survival, his longevity. Yet as with other titles, there is something more abstract informing the title change. I submit that

the kid’s transformation into the man also signals his final development into personhood, as defined by the novel. A person must possess two things to be fully formed: the ability to perform physical action and to use language. For able-bodied men, physical action must include the ability to ride and kill; able-bodiness depends on physicality. To be a person, though, requires language. As we saw in Chapter 1, the

injured Sproule can speak, but he does not have the physical capabilities; he is no longer

a person and must wait for death. Shelby is similarly wounded. He can speak, but

without the requisite physical capability he loses his personhood. Shelby is “from a prominent Kentucky family and had attended Transylvania College” and “he was clear in the head.” But, since he “had had his hip shattered by a ball,” he could no longer

perform the physical requirements of personhood. His conversation with the kid reveals his lack of agency. He tells the kid, “If I had a gun I’d shoot you,” to which the kid replies,

“You aint got a gun” (216). Important to note is the kid’s own language in the Shelby

section, as discussed in Chapter 1. Prior to his becoming the man, his exchange with

Shelby is the most he speaks in one sitting. It is noteworthy that his own personhood shines through most when addressing someone who has fallen. Finally, James Roberts gives hints that he has physical capabilities. As we saw in Chapter 28, he walks to the

water. He follows the judge. His lack of language, however, prevents him from fulfilling

all the novel's requirements for personhood. Then there is the judge. He is physically

88 dominant and speaks a variety of languages. He possesses a surplus of both person-

making qualities.

The kid becomes the man, not the person. The new title begs the question as to whether personhood is exclusively male in the novel. It would initially seem it is because

so much of the actions, so many of the characters, the people who do things in the

novel, are male. Plus, the majority of the women in the novel are sexual objects,

prostitutes – members of the deviant populations discussed in Chapter 1. These

unnamed women reside in shadows of the men in the novel, hidden in the periphery.

Then there is Sarah Borginnis. Her treatment of James Roberts might not have yielded much, but she did clean him and, in a moment of intense agency, she burned his cage. In a powerful way, Sarah Borginnis is one of the most potent examples of personhood in the novel. She physically and verbally challenges the makeshift normative structures.

She calls James Roberts by his name. She burns the symbol of his captivity. She bathes

Roberts in the river. She is smeared in his feces, “but she seemed not to notice” (269).

She confronts James Roberts as a person, and by arguing for his personhood, she

strongly establishes her own. Finally, she is named, the only woman in the novel awarded with a name. And it is a first and last name, a distinction not even most men get. So personhood is not an exclusively male designation. The world that the people inhabit is undoubtedly male dominated, but Sarah Borginnis proves that personhood is not specific to gender.

89 The kid becomes the man when his language meets his physicality. His meeting

with Elrod and his companion in the last chapter synthesizes the brutal physicality

necessary for survival and the same sympathetic language that spared Shelby. As Elrod becomes more belligerent in his verbal attacks on the man, the former kid now calmly uses his words, declaring, “you better go on” (335). He tells them a bit of his story: “I was fifteen year old when I was first shot” (334). His language is not used to control or manipulate the “violent children orphaned by war”; it is used as cautionary warning

against the very actions that defined his previous life. His language is a warning; it offers

mercy. Though he inevitably shoots Elrod, he does so only after words were not enough.

At that moment, language and physicality meet. The formula is complete. The man recognizes the dual importance of harnessing responsible language and necessary

action. He admonishes Elrod to watch his language; he clearly does not wish to kill him.

As with Shelby, the man’s rare extended conversation reveals his different moral standing. He wishes to spare a life that does not need to be taken. Language attempts to temper the physical. But when language is not enough, physical action must still be

utilized. It is this combination of language and action, warning and execution that signals the kid’s transition to the man.

The final scene is a bacchanalia. The man enters a saloon where “a dimly seething rabble had coagulated within” (337). The saloon is raucous, with “garishly clad whores,” and a dancing bear. Someone shoots the bear. In the midst of this drunken pandemonium sits the judge. He converses with the man, but the judge does the

90 majority of the talking; the man offers short, cold responses. The judge espouses his master plans of a final, individual dance, wherein he alone is a “true dancer.” He seems to be recruiting, or eulogizing, the man. In an ambiguous moment the man submits himself to the judge, who “was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him” (347). Outside the room a patron warns someone not to look inside. The curious man does anyway. “Good God almighty,” is his reaction (348). The judge exits alone and begins dancing in the nude, professing his immortality, “and he is a great favorite” (349).

His super-ability triumphs in the end. It is the judge’s intense combination of eloquent language and brutal action that ends the novel. The man’s cautionary language and defensive action in the earlier scene with Elrod is bastardized and made cosmic by

the judge, who warns the man about the fate of all mankind, about “those honorable

men who recognize the sanctity of blood” (344). Men like the man, the judge says, will fail, leaving only “that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance” (345). Submission to the “blood of war” is not just a physical offering; it involves speaking, language. Again, the destructive celebration of metis found in the metaphor of circular, round music, is embodied in the

judge’s bald, similarly rounded, physical form. The judge’s language usurps the moral language of the man. The bloody action that the man’s language warns against becomes a sacred activity for the judge. The destruction that the man balances with his carefully

91 chosen words becomes artistic creation in the mouth of the judge. Time transformed

the kid into the man, but did nothing to the judge, who “seemed little changed or none in all these years” (338). At the end of the novel, the promise of humanity found in the

man’s balance of language and physical action is mocked by the judge’s unabashed surplus of both. The man’s language warns against the use of force. He suggests that violence should be tempered. These suppositions are laughed at by the judge, who fills the page with bloodthirsty language. His words cast a shadow and drown out whatever

human balance the man had obtained.

And it is not just the man’s language that is overpowered; the gaze that the kid worked to establish, the “optical democracy” argued for in the novel, is likewise made irrelevant as the door shuts behind the judge and the man in the concluding scene. The

novel begins with a demand that readers “see the child” (3). This invitation to establish a gaze is heralded by the Leonids meteor shower of 1833. The same cosmic language

heralds the dissolution of the reader’s gaze upon the newly-minted man as “stars were falling across the sky” just before the man is enveloped by the judge, who “[shoots] the wooden barlatch home behind him” (347). The gaze that the narrator demands from the readers at the outset is now denied. The gaze the kid had established with disabled characters and the linguistic connection he sought to establish with Elrod is made

insultingly useless. The progress made by the kid and James Roberts’s gazing, the almost fully realized, egalitarian, “optical democracy” is halted. The judge shuts the door and

92 obstructs our vision. The once democratic lens of the novel is censored. The only visual cues that are left are secondhand, and they offer only grim hints.

Finally, the judge’s monstrous language is matched by his “immense and terrible” flesh, rendering all other gazes and language obsolete. Perhaps it is a cosmic joke, a terrible satire of the kid’s maturation. How could anyone be a person in such a cruel landscape? How could anyone possess moral fortitude in the face of mindless violence? The judge laughs at the attempt. The final image further mocks our definition of personhood by depicting a dancing judge repeating his immortality via the narrator:

“he never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he

will never die” (349). He uses language and physicality to celebrate his difference and his triumph over the abled and disabled. And he is celebrated, “a great favorite,” as was

Hephaestus, the disabled god. But the implications are dire and his innovations are

deadly, unlike Hephaestus’ constructive embodied rhetoric. What good is the man's physicality and language when faced with super-ability? Does language and physicality

matter when there is someone who overflows with both? Indeed, the seriousness of the

novel, the very definition of what it is to be a human, is made trivial by the mētis - wielding judge.

Then there is the Epilogue. The novel's final ambiguous image of a man

“progressing over the plain” has been read in different ways. Harold Bloom reads the

Epilogue as a Promethean image, of a man stealing fire from the gods. Others see the

93 image of post-hole digging– if that is what is happening; it is implied, but unclear – as the demarcation of the frontier and the death of lawlessness, marauding – the activities of Glanton and his gang. Still others take the ending as a sign of progress, hope in the

spread of civilization (Estes 124-26). What is clear, though, is the inherent insignificance

signaled by people who “move on again” (351). In a striking, final use of “optical democracy,” time is shifted. The people of Blood Meridian are long gone. In geological time, humans are not important. Whether or not the judge has lived on, and whether or

not the kid’s humane treatment of disability has had a meaningful impact, is insignificant in this moment. In the Epilogue, the man who progresses, whatever work

he is doing, and the men who gather bones – they are able-bodied. The kid’s gaze, his

transformation into manhood, the judge’s tricks and super-ability, and James Roberts’

journey from sideshow freak to a pilot-fish of the judge are all obsolete when the

context is shifted. The readers are able to see again after the judge locked the door, but

their ability to interpret what they see is limited by the dense, acutely ambiguous language of the Epilogue. Like the wandering, perhaps random vignettes that construct

the larger narrative, the Epilogue places the reader’s gaze in another time and place, away from what they know. The people that are left have new standards, new norms – they are different. However, though the industry has changed, and though civilization has widened its reach, there is still ability, there is still language, and despite whatever

progress may or may not be implied, personhood still requires both.

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