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bolido_sentimental  1yr ago (text post)   4133 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 25, 2022

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I read it about four years ago. It is fantastic. I liked it much better than The Road. It is also the hardest book I've ever read, but I'm not a native English speaker, so that might be why.

Ben Nichols made an album inspired by it, but I feel like it completely misses the mark. I listened to the soundtrack for The Revenant a lot while reading it. It just captures the feeling of dread and despair so well.

If you have any thoughts on the ending, I would love to hear them. I've read a few interpretations online, but they are not really in line with my own understanding and I didn't find them very convincing either.

I like the Nichols album. Not for listening to it while reading, dear god, no, but I like it just as its own thing. A tribute to the book; not a soundtrack.

As for the ending, I have my thoughts on it, yes. And I'd like to type them out, but I fear I don't have the time right now. Here's the very short version, please excuse me if I fail to make sense:

  • The book is nominally and thematically about things reaching their meridian, i.e., the highest point, from which they must necessarily go down towards their ending. Many individuals and groups in the book have their high point or aristeia, then decline and end, usually painfully so. Even more others have already ended, and all we hear of is their bones or leftovers or not even that but only the narrator's speculation.

  • The kid is born for violence, and seemingly goes towards his own violent meridian together with the Glanton Gang, but then rejects this trajectory and selects a different one. For decades the man just wanders, an illiterate with his bible, a refugee from violence who yet attains some triumph, a different meridian, by managing to live in peace against his own nature and former trajectory for so long a time. Then he witnesses the slaughter of the pilgrims, hopes in vain to save the old woman, kills again even if in self-defence, and suddenly finds himself back on his old trajectory, but not on the ascent he was on as the Kid, and nowhere near the Meridian, but already at the very end, at which the Judge simply collects him as a matter of fact.

  • The post-digger striking sparks is the very earliest beginning of a different such arc. McCarthy often writes of carrying the fire, and the Glanton gang were in their ascendancy associated with fires, but here the fire is in its infancy - a spark, the smallest form of fire. The book followed one arc to its meridian and decline, and in doing so passed over the remains of many older arcs, and here we are given the image that even as all the arcs we followed joined the corpses and ruins, new ones yet begin.

Don't get me wrong, I like the album as well. I've been fond of Ben Nichols vocals ever since I heard the credits song to Take Shelter.

I pretty much agree with your take, except I don't think the man is at the end of his violent trajectory when he meets the judge in the bar.

I read the last chapter again, and what I was thinking of specifically was what went down in the outhouse after they meet and the dancing bear is killed. It is very vague, and some interpretations I've seen believes the Judge literally eats the Man and others that he just kills him. I don't really like either. I perceive the Judge as someone who the members of the gang places their guilt of their terrible deeds upon. The judge is the personification of the cruelty that every man is capable of. When the Man sees the Judge at the bar, it says

"He wore a round hat with a narrow brim and he was among every kind of man, herder and bullwhacker and drover and freighter and miner and hunter and soldier and pedlar and gambler and driver and drunkard and thief and he was among the dregs of the earth in beggary a thousand years and he was among the scapegrace scions of eastern dynasties and in all that motley assemblage he sat by them and yet alone as if he were some other sort of man entire and he seemed little changed or none in all these years."

You are right, that the Kid is born for violence and has been running from his violent tendencies personified as the judge.

After the bear is killed it says that some of the patrons are looking for the little girl who was crying over the dead bear as she is nowhere to be found. I take that as when the man enters the outhouse where the naked judge is waiting for him, he is consumed by the judge metaphorically speaking and kills the little girl in there.

The Kid is not a reliable narrator. There are multiple accounts of children ending up dead and it is strongly implied that the judge abuses and kills them, but my interpretation is that it is the kid who does it, but he absolves himself by letting the judge be responsible.

I don't know if it makes much sense and it might change when I read it again some day as most of the book is not very clear in my memory.

I think this requires a fair bit of reinterpretation of the story's events. I wondered about it while reading, but ultimately rejected it.

Evidence for: The Judge is more often seen counselling the gang, encouraging them, teaching them, but not seen committing the deeds himself. We see the aftermath and assume he is responsible. He is almost inhuman, impossibly skilled, knowledgeable, strong. His being the personification of evil/violence/war/his philosophy, he certainly doesn't seem real.

Evidence against: But on the other hand, he does act a fair bit himself and can't easily be removed. I'm not sure how to reassess scenes like the stand-off with Toadvine, Brown, Tobin, and the Kid toward the end without the Judge there as a real character. Holden negotiates on behalf of the gang with some of the more cultured/learned characters in the story. He teaches the gang how to make gunpowder, etc. Sure, these events could be waved away, but.. who did it then? Is that another aspect of Glanton's personality? If so, why is it the Judge the more intellectual, rational part rather than the violent, impulsive part that is still attributed to Glanton.

I thought it worked better if he was a real, though possibly supernatural character. The confrontation at the end is the two of them committing to their respective philosophies. The Judge again lectures the man on war and the way of the world. The man again rejects it. "You aint nothin".

The Judge will have him anyway, but not willingly.

IMO it's worth taking another look at the opening quotes of the book.

Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

PAUL VALÉRY

It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.

JACOB BOEHME

Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a reexamination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped.

THE YUMA DAILY SUN

The theme these suggest to me is the following: Violence and death, for lack of a better term, are an essential component of life. Rejecting them will not free you from them. They're coming for you no matter what. Let's take a look at No Country For Old Men:

He did close his eyes. He closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face.

Of course Chigurh is not an otherworldly entity on the same level as the Judge, but both characters seem to stand with one foot in the mundane and with the other in the supernatural. Both bring death, in various ways. Both expound on philosophy. Neither can be stopped. For all the fight he puts up, the only reason why Llewelyn Moss manages to not get killed by Chigurh is because others get to him first. For all the geographic and philosophical distance the Kid tries to put between himself and the Judge, the Judge still gets him in the end.

Here's another from BM:

Have you got a gun? he said. A gun? A gun. Have you got a gun. Not on me I aint. Brown pulled a small fiveshot Colt from his belt and pitched it to him. He caught it and stood holding it uncertainly. You got one now. Now shoot the nigger. Wait a goddamn minute, said Owens. Shoot him, said Brown. Jackson had risen and he pulled one of the big pistols from his belt. Owens pointed the pistol at him. You put that down, he said. You better forget about givin orders and shoot the son of a bitch. Put it down. Goddamn, man. Tell him to put it down. Shoot him. He cocked the pistol. Jackson fired.

You can't get away from it. You just plain can't. Whether you're born for violence like the Kid or thrust into it like Owens, it's there. Death is there. It's the fundamental stuff of the universe. Run or fight or close your eyes in denial, the end is the same.

I strongly feel that this is one of McCarthy's central points. It makes no sense for the Judge to be an abstract position that can be adopted or rejected by regular humans, who then have all the agency. Whatever principle the Judge and Chigurh represent has agency of its own. It moves, it acts, one way or another you must engage it - and you can't just refuse to be overcome by it.

The Judge must be a physical actor to represent the agency of this primordial force.

I didn't mean to imply that the judge isn't real. I do think he is an actual person in the gang and possibly the worst of them all. I'm just not sure everything can be ascribed to him. It is not easy to reconcile and maybe even impossible on a second reading.

soundtrack for The Revenant

Yeah, that fits. I thought of Earth, and was surprised to learn they'd also done an inspired-by album. The subtitle, "Printing in the Infernal Method", is from William Blake, which recalls the film Dead Man.

thoughts on the ending

Assume you're referring to the epilogue? I also found it perplexing and looked online for interpretations.

One: "Perhaps the digger is a figure for the novelist himself, striking fire out of the dead holes of history, bearing witness, though it is not at all clear that those following understand."

but that sort of meta-commentary feels unnecessary, self-centered, and incongruous with the preceding novel. I dunno. Maybe?

Others: That the post digger represents the coming of civilization and the end of the bloody, evening redness, (Epilogue: "In the dawn"), or that it represents the opposite - the continuation of that philosophy after the night.

I honestly don't know. I think the fact that so many interpretations disagree so wildly means it was intentionally left ambiguous. Like you, none of the ones I read seemed right.

I've never heard of Earth, but I'm gonna give them a listen.

I was actually thinking more of what happens after the judge and the man meets in the end. You can see my reply to Southkraut.

I am also kind of lost on the epilogue, but I think you are right that it is intentionally ambiguous.

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