“What’s He a Judge Of?”: Blood Meridian’s Paths of Law

Abstract

This article reads Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as a legal allegory. It focuses on the novel’s mysterious villain, Judge Holden, and traces three titular “paths of law.” First, it reads Blood Meridian as a self-deconstructing legal origin myth, arguing that the murderous but cultured Holden reveals the law’s tautological foundations by blurring Walter Benjamin’s binaries of “lawmaking” and “law-preserving” violence. Second, it construes the judge’s destructive pursuit of natural science as allegorizing the violence of legal interpretation, in which the validation of one interpretation entails the destruction of all others. Finally, it finds a counterpoise to Holden’s juridical violence in the cryptic epilogue, in which the possibility of meaning is not arbitrarily narrowed but endlessly proliferated.