So... who or what is he?
an overwrought allegory of racial piety and its consequences
>>25201347An embodiment of the all-consuming violence inherent to mankind and nature itself, I assume. Haven't read the book though.
>>25201359i'm going to walk this back a bit. the epigraph "sie müssen schlafen aber ich muss tanzen" is key to understanding how mccarthy uses the judge. also, in his own (mccarthy's) words, the judge is a mephisto-type. the irony of such a god or demon, who MUST dance, is that the dance has become pure order, and he lacks the chaos, the difference, of sleep. in the same way that the greek gods envied humans their mortality, the judge envies the human ability to be deprived of agency in sleep, because he is subordinated entirely to agency. the irony of the judge is, his godliness and overabundant power remove him from the fundamental human experience of death. he is the spiritual parasite of filial piety incarnated as a half-ton white babyman. i have to give mccarthy at least that much credit
>>25201347Stan
>>25201347just a chill kinda guy
>>25201428Judge Holden is pretty cool, he kill Mexican and doesn't afraid of anything.
>>25201431DEAR KID, I WROTE YOU BUT YOU STILL AIN'T CALLING
>>25201435to put it another way: the judge can't understand why toadvine and the kid sympathize with the people they're scalping. it doesn't even register for him that the beings they are killing and scalping are human, because the spirit of the race that drives humans to kill other humans cannot acknowledge the humanity of the other, or that spirit will cease to exist. whereas glanton simply chooses to ignore the existence of the other, which is where his particular inner chaos and crookery come from
>>25201444>it doesn't even register for him that the beings they are killing and scalping are human, because the spirit of the race that drives humans to kill other humans cannot acknowledge the humanity of the otherhe's literally me fr
also, errybody pulls putz over the judge and what he "means," but nobody talks sproule or what is arguable the best line in the novel, "he held out his bloody hands, as if in accusation, then clasped them to his ears and howled a howl of such outrage as to stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat of the world." and i think people should spend more time analyzing sproule and his place in the novel
>>25201462the best line in the novel is "that which exists without my knowledge exists without my consent"
>>25201468it's a strong idea and very emblematic of the judge but i think the prosody is stronger in "stitch a caesura in the pulsebeat"
>>25201462>>25201468For me it's:>The judge seized that great slag wandered for what millennia from what unreckonable corner of the universe and he raised it overhead and stood tottering and then lunged forward. It cleared the mark by a foot and he shared with no one the specie piled on the saddleblanket at the farrier’s feet for not even Glanton had been willing to underwrite this third trial.
>>25201482I think about that scene a lot. Very based.
>>25201482the selfishness of ideas
>He never sleeps, the judge.He's eating, eating. He says that he will never diet
>>25201536Damn i cant even greentext
>>25201536ficken lömäo
>>25201444>it doesn't even register for him that the beings they are killing and scalping are human, because the spirit of the race that drives humans to kill other humans cannot acknowledge the humanity of the other, or that spirit will cease to exisThis is like the exact opposite of what he expresses in the book. And even if he's a sophist you still can't say he's ignorant to it, as in order to lie you must have knowledge of what truth you're obscuring or distorting.
>>25201563again, i think that's his irony. he's an idea wearing the skin of a man. he understands humanity as a god would, through "pure intelligibility," which also means he can't really know what it is to be human, on the level of experience. he will never know what it means to tire of the dance
He's the whale from Moby Dick.
>>25201647WHITE WHALEHOLY GRAIL
nietzsche's ubermensch
>>25201347The Enlightenment and the myth of human progress.For all of his learning and sophistication and ingenuity, it only further enables his base and savage tendencies.
>>25201695this "base and savage" functions as a "ratio sive causa." mccarthy does not say "to be savage is to be base." he reserves his contempt for the lazy women, "faces painted lurid like transvestites" or however he has to bring trannies into it
white america...
>>25201704Interesting. Forgive my verbal imprecision; what I meant is that, unlike many people believed back in the day, progress in technology and education did not get rid of the human capacity or inclination for wanton cruelty, violence and domination, but rather just provided means to rationalize it and better tools to carry it out, as we see in the events and wars of the 20th century. There's a parallel with Judge Holden.I have only read the novel once, so I will probably gain much more insight into how to interpret it when I re-read it soon.
>>25201725i don't think this is necessarily wrong but i also think it's important to remember that mccarthy is very explicitly not laying a value judgement on the cruelty. that's the point of the valéry epigraph:>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, more and more, you fear blood. Blood and time.
>>25201347Demiurge. Or one of his Archons. >>25201390or maybe this
>>25201347Who? He da judge What? He cuteThe man is like the antichrist in the sense that instead of dying for your sins, he sins so you don’t have to, or so your sins don’t look bad in comparison.
>>25201347You... if you had been through what he had been through...
>>25201704>he reserves his contempt for the lazy womenbased
>>25201347An anthropromorized form of the ancient primordial evil of Noth America's deserts.
Holden is an actor/artist/performer. He is anything that he needs to be (or the reader needs him to be) and presents himself that way. He is a self-aware symbol to symbolism itself.
>>25201347https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZpliatJMGs&pp=ygUManVkZ2UgaG9sZGVuhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37MGtYLtXMo
>>25201578i think your mind is addled by your idealogical beliefs. another judge line is "every child knows that play is nobler than work" which means that you would be better and happier doing what you want because you want to than doing something for money or a family. the judge is very consistently selfish.
Seethe anon. He is pale and thin he wears a thin and ragged Evangelion shirt. He stokes his penis. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags effay and darker 7-11s beyond that harbor yet a few last tendies. His folk are known for jerkers of cock and drinkers of cum but in truth his father has been dissatisfied with him. He lies in monster energy he quotes from boards whose names are now lost. The anon crouches by the computer and watches him.Night of your birth. Thirty-three. Dubs. The autist they were called. Shaka how the wall did fall. I looked for BCC holes in the heavens. The nigger stove.The mother dead raped by pakis did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never pays his bills the anon is NEET. He has a sister in this world that looks down at him like he is garbage. He watches pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless politics. All shitpost present in that visage the anon the father of the bant.
>>25202007slight disagreement. if the judge had said, "play is nobler than work," i would agree completely. but he says, "every child knows that play is nobler than work." there is a reason we forget this as we grow. but i agree that the judge is consistently selfish
>>25201347>So... who or what is he?Based.
>>25201827and also he can crush your skull with one hand
>>25201347just an average american guy
>>25201347he's a metaphor made flesh
>>25203629Did he fuck his pet retard often you reckon?
>>25203640I always imagined him trying to get the fool to mount the slave girls like a science experiment.
>>25201347He is a gnostic archon or "fallen angel"; an aspect of Darkness charged with ruling over the material world and its souls. In Manichaeism, they are describes as the result of an abortion; only Light can create, and Darkness can only spread or create new servants through "copulation". The process results in the aborted fetus mutating into an archon, a being variously described as childlike, virginal, androgynous, hairless, of gigantic stature, but simultaneously beastlike... echoing the nephilim of Enoch as well as Judge Holden's physical appearance in the book.
>>25201440Kek, I understood that reference.
the embodiment of being based.
