/lit/ - Literature

They rode on.
or
I aim to

>>6459627
Judge Holden's actions aren't simple minded. His actions are justified according to his philosphy. For you to simy disregard the merit of his philosphy based off of his actions( which he justifies in the book) is very unintelligent and foolish. "This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hands is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so,war is the truest form of divination."

White Guilt the Western by Cormac McCarthy

>>5107169
Isn't that just fanart? BM had some pretty good fan art.

So guys, what do you think Judge Holden is?

Well, it’s quite clear that Judge Holden is an supernatural entity, and not a conventional human being.

I like the fact that McCarthy, however, builds this notion (of Holden’s otherworldly ancestry) very slowly, with a multitude of small touches. At first we have the descriptions of the man strange physic, and then his multitude of abilities are gradually presented: paleontology, archaeology, linguistics, law, technical drawing, geology, chemistry, prestidigitation, and philosophy. We realize that it’s almost impossible for a simple human being to dominate so many areas of knowledge.

Then there are Holden strange habits of dancing in the middle of storms, and the suggestions of pedophilia. He also has an enormous strength, and at the same time keen, extremely fast reflexes. He apparently has immunity to sleep and aging, and never shows any fear or anxiety.

There is one scene (the one when the men must prepare emergency powder to fight the Indians) in which Holden seems even to control the weather: he looks to a cloud on the sky, that will block the sun and frustrate the powder-production, and the cloud, inexplicably, changes its course.

So, what is Holden? The most obvious answer would be a demonic entity. There is also people who think on him as a personification of war. I think that McCarthy doesn’t know himself what this creature is supposed to be, but I am pretty sure that he tried to drench his work with a perpetual fog of demonic citations; he tried to permeate the writing with strange supernatural shadows and echoes. What he wanted to create was a demon, and then he left the interpretation for the readers and critics.

But what do you guys think?

>>4518214

Other knives were already in play. Dorsey was grappling with the Mexicans and Henderson Smith had drawn his bowie and half severed a man's arm with it and the man was standing with the dark arterial blood spraying between his fingers where he tried to hold the wound shut. The judge got Dorsey to his feet and they backed toward the cantina with the Mexicans feinting and jabbing at them with their knives. From inside came the uninterrupted sound of gunfire and the doorframe was filling up with smoke. The judge turned at the door and stepped over the several corpses sprawled there. Inside the huge pistols roared without intermission and the twenty or so Mexicans who'd been in the room were strewn about in every position, shot to pieces among the overturned chairs and the tables with the fresh splinters blown out of the wood and the mud walls pocked everywhere by the big conical bullets. The survivors were making for the daylight in the doorway and the first of these encountered the judge there and cut at him with his knife. But the judge was like a cat and he sidestepped the man and seized his arm and broke it and picked the man up by his head. He put him against the wall and smiled at him but the man had begun to bleed from the ears and the blood was running down between the judge's fingers and over his hands and when the judge turned him loose there was something wrong with his head and he slid to the floor and did not get up.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian