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

I. Blood Meridian, the Western, and the Origins of Law

The aforementioned dearth of law-and-literature readings of Blood Meridian is not wholly inexplicable, for as James Dorson writes in what appears to be the only such interpretation in print, “Judge Holden’s behavior in the novel”—and indeed the behavior of the entire scalp-hunting “Glanton gang” of which he is the intellectual leader—“appears to have little to do with lawfulness and much to do with lawlessness.” ¹¹ And yet to say that McCarthy’s novel is a bloody, anarchic Western with nary a legal institution to be found is not to preclude a juridical reading of it. Far from it, for the Western is itself American culture’s premier narrative of the origin of law. In its mythic function, it is comparable to the trial scene at the close of the Oresteia, in which the rule of law emerges from a system of “justice” based on interminable cycles of violent revenge—an origin-story identical to that described by Holmes in The Common Law. ¹² As Richard Slotkin writes in an exhaustive study of the genre, the Western from James Fenimore Cooper to John Ford is concerned with the extralegal, or rather prelegal, violence upon which the rule of law is founded: it “implies that its violence is an essential and necessary part of the process through which American society was established and through which its democratic values are defended and enforced.” ¹³

The legal significance of the Western, as Slotkin describes it, is that the force of law can only be realized through the ultimately incompatible law of force. Thus the triumph of the conventional Western vigilante hero, a figure who may be honorable and just but who is also unconstrained by the law’s procedural niceties, is to inaugurate the very legal order in which he has no place and then literally or figuratively “ride off into the sunset.” Perhaps the finest example of this narrative is Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), in which the naïve, idealistic attorney Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) can only defeat the villainous bandit Valance and establish the rule of law with the hidden assistance of the cynical gunslinger Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who wisely tells him: “I know those law books mean a lot to you, but not out here; out here a man settles his own problems.” ¹⁴ The law books only take on meaning when they become enforceable, which is to say when Wayne’s character has “settled the problem” of Valance and become obsolete himself.

The juridical narrative of a Western like Liberty Valance is consequently a striking parallel to that of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.” Like Holmes in his previously quoted letter to Pollock, Benjamin in the “Critique” places the rule of law atop an unstable and ever-shifting foundation of violence. Central to Benjamin’s account, at least until its vatic final turn to a bloodless and expiatory “divine violence,” is the dialectic between “lawmaking” and “law-preserving” violence. Lawmaking violence is done as a means to “natural ends,” that is, to ideals of justice that have yet to be historically acknowledged and made legally enforceable; law-preserving violence, such as criminal punishment, is legitimated and monopolized by the already existing legal order that it enforces. ¹⁵ Precisely because the rule of law entails a state “monopoly of violence,” lawmaking violence is prohibited by the very legal systems that it creates, which it threatens “not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law.” ¹⁶ But the rule of law can never quite transcend its violent origins, which come into view with certain types of violence—Benjamin’s examples are capital punishment and police brutality—that uncannily blur the line between law-preserving and lawmaking violence.

In Blood Meridian, Judge Holden functions in much the same manner as capital punishment and police violence in Benjamin’s account: he altogether collapses the distinction between law-creating and law-preserving violence, conjoining the two into a single terrifying figure. To say that the judge reveals “something rotten in the law,” as Benjamin writes of the death penalty, is an exercise in understatement. ¹⁷ Like the literary antecedents to whom he is most often compared—Shakespeare’s Iago, Milton’s Satan, Conrad’s Kurtz, and (above all) both Melville’s Captain Ahab and Moby Dick—Holden is the novel’s supreme manifestation of both intellect and force combined with unsurpassable malignity. As a polymath proficient in multiple languages and in such varied arts and disciplines as law, history, natural science, astronomy, archaeology, music, and dance, the judge is, as John Cant writes, “a metaphor for culture itself.” ¹⁸ But as the apex predator of his ecosystem, he is equally a metaphor for nature. A seven-foot hairless albino of supernatural strength, a serial murderer, probable rapist, and possible cannibal of children, and a seemingly immortal and omnipresent avatar of violence, Holden is in effect Melville’s white whale in human form. He thus melds the extralegal violence of nature with the sanctioned violence of law itself.

In a classic Western like Liberty Valance, the supersession of lawmaking violence by law-preserving violence tacitly validates the rule of law, however uneasy its foundation is revealed to be. Nostalgic though they may be for the prelegal heroism of a Natty Bumppo or a John Wayne, most Westerns are nevertheless narratives of progress, in which the dangerous “wilderness” of the lawless Wild West is transformed into the peaceful and well-ordered “garden” of law. ¹⁹ The rule of law may be both founded and preserved by violence, but the orderly and constrained violence of law is still an improvement over lawlessness, chaos, and endless cycles of vengeance. Blood Meridian, by contrast, precludes such easy resolution, for it situates both lawmaking and law-preserving violence in one and the same person, Judge Holden. Holden’s law-preserving violence may cloak itself in the garb of culture and rationality, as in the judge’s eloquent claims to have reduced the entire world to the notes and sketches he keeps in his journal, but it ultimately proves indistinguishable from lawmaking violence. Hence the rather unsubtle epigraph in McCarthy’s original draft of the novel, a quote from William James: “There is a deep truth in what the school of Schopenhauer insists on—the illusoriness of the notion of moral progress. The more brutal forms of evil that go are replaced by others more subtle and more poisonous.” ²⁰ True to that epigraph, McCarthy reveals in Judge Holden the underlying unity of all violence, whether lawmaking or law-preserving. There can be no illusion that the judge’s merciless violence will pave the way for a more just and humane social order when he is himself the foremost representative of that incipient order.

In keeping with Derrida’s anti-foundationalist account in “Force of Law,” the conjunction of these two types of violence in Judge Holden thus exposes the “performative tautology” at the root of the law. ²¹ Building upon Benjamin’s “Critique,” Derrida describes the law as a self-legitimating ouroboros, founded on a violence that it can only retroactively justify and legalize: “Since the origin of authority, the foundation or ground, the position of the law can’t by definition rest on anything but themselves, they are themselves a violence without ground.” ²² A legal regime nominally or temporally separate from the violence that institutes it, such as a national government and the revolution by which it was created, can at least create a purportedly independent “mystical foundation” for its authority. But because McCarthy’s judge embodies at once the foundation (violence) and the thing founded (law), his authority transparently rests on nothing outside itself. The best answer to the kid’s aforementioned question—what’s he a judge of?—is, ultimately, nothing.

Hence the novel’s repeated references to Holden’s insubstantiality and lack of origin. As Dorson, also drawing upon Derrida, aptly writes, “like the groundless violence of the law that he embodies, the judge hovers just above the abyss.” ²³ The judge first appears to the Glanton gang like “a mirage” in the middle of the desert, sitting calmly on a rock as though expecting them; as one of the gang members later recounts to the kid, “You couldnt [sic] tell where he’d come from.” ²⁴ Elsewhere he is compared to a “great ponderous djinn” who steps through the campfire and is “delivered up” by the flames “as if he were in some way native to their element.” ²⁵ Finally, toward the end of the novel the kid has a nightmare about the judge, in which Holden’s lack of origin becomes apparent:

Whatever his antecedents he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. ²⁶

What McCarthy writes here of the judge holds equally true of the legal order he embodies: there is no “system” capable of tracing it back in time and no “ultimate atavistic egg” to legitimate its violence. The judge’s authority is instead, as Dorson observes, wholly a product “of his words and actions themselves,” which are purely performative and are “as self-referential as [they are] self-serving.” ²⁷ In the following section, I turn to some of those “words and actions,” which epitomize the “more subtle and more poisonous” forms of evil and violence acknowledged in McCarthy’s original epigraph: namely, the violence of legal interpretation itself.

II. “Singling Out the Thread of Order”: Judge Holden and the Jurispathic Function

Where Benjamin and Derrida expose the violence by which the rule of law is both inaugurated and enforced, Cover’s 1983 article “Nomos and Narrative” reveals an insidious violence at work within the very act of legal interpretation. “Judges are people of violence,” Cover writes, because “[t]heirs is the jurispathic office. Confronting the luxuriant growth of a hundred legal traditions [nomoi], they assert that this one is law and destroy or try to destroy the rest.” ²⁸ Courts, that is, fulfill not so much a “need for law” as “the need to suppress law, to choose between two or more laws, to impose upon laws a hierarchy.” ²⁹ Every act of legal creation entails an equal and opposite act of legal destruction; every interpretation of law or fact is also a rejection of all the other competing interpretations, and thus “always takes place in the shadow of coercion.” ³⁰ According to Cover, in American law the (literally) supreme embodiment of this jurispathic, interpretation-ending function is no less than the U.S. Supreme Court itself, which Hamilton justified in The Federalist as a necessary corrective to “the confusion which would unavoidably result from the contradictory decisions of a number of independent judicatories.” ³¹ More pithily, Justice Robert Jackson invoked this jurispathic necessity in his famous formulation of the Court’s own mystical foundation of authority: “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.” ³² Finality for its own sake, and the resulting preclusion of further meaning-making and interpretation, is the core jurispathic principle.

Even though he is never shown presiding in a courtroom, Judge Holden is, as it were, the Supreme Court of McCarthy’s novel, the aspiring “suzerain of the earth” who “rules even where there are other rulers” and whose “authority countermands local judgements.” ³³ The judge’s jurispathic project of imposing order on the world, by which “the existence of each last entity” will be “routed out and made to stand naked before him,” is epitomized by his strange practice of recording natural and archaeological specimens in his notebook and then destroying the originals:

The judge placed his hands on the ground . . . This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation . . . The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge 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. ³⁴

Although the judge is nominally speaking as a practitioner of natural science as he compiles birds, butterflies, and botanical specimens, his monologue is also a legal speech-act, legitimating his juridical authority via legal terms like “claim,” “dispensation,” “decision,” and, repeated for emphasis, “autonomous.” Indeed, the very complexity and abstraction of Holden’s speech here and elsewhere, which sharply contrasts with the terse, empirical tone of the narrative itself, replicates the destructive act of interpretation being described. As with Cover’s jurispathic judges, Holden’s “decisions” impose law and order on the universe by eradicating all “autonomous” life—that is, all life with a nomos of its own—and fixing it within his own final interpretation. The judge’s book is thus, as Joshua Masters writes, “the ultimate form of textual control in that the very referent has been expunged”; Petra Mundik likewise writes that “[b]y destroying the original object and leaving only the representation behind, the judge makes sure that no reality is permitted to exist outside the text,” leaving only “the judge’s own interpretation” of the object he has sketched. ³⁵ In the act of “singling out” one thread from the tapestry, Holden rips out all the others.

In depicting Holden’s juridical imperialism only indirectly through the medium of natural science, McCarthy doubtless makes a realistic concession to his novel’s lawless setting, where courts of law are nowhere to be found. But the metaphor of science is also apt inasmuch as it figures a particular formalistic, scientific approach to the law that held sway at the close of the nineteenth century. This jurisprudence was associated most prominently with the Harvard Law School dean Christopher Columbus Langdell, whose “case method” of education purported to extract general principles from precedential cases and to logically deduce from these the correct ruling in a subsequent case. Like Holden’s scientific enterprises, this method rests on a destructive textualization of its own. Legal cases, like natural specimens, are messy things, the unique disputes of living people caught in the train of circumstances. The legal process begins by carefully pruning each case’s tangle of facts into admissible evidence, creating a relevant, material narrative upon which the court pronounces judgment. In order to transform that judgment into a general rule with precedential force (e.g., “no contract is binding without consideration”), the common law confines the original facts of the case to the pages of a judicial opinion; turns flesh-and-blood people into those airiest of abstractions, “plaintiff” and “defendant”; and (via the case method) limits the case’s meaning to the legal principle it signifies.

The process, in other words, is not all that different from sketching an object in a book and then destroying the original. Moreover, Judge Holden’s very name echoes the word for the general rule drawn from a case’s facts: the holding. ³⁶ The judge gives voice to exactly this process of abstraction in one of his strangest monologues, when he refuses to recount his conversation with a Mexican sergeant about one of the Glanton gang’s members:

It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts—to the extent that they can be readily made to do so—should find a repository in the witness of some third party . . . Words are things. The words [Sergeant Aguilar] is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning. ³⁷

This is perhaps the most explicitly judicial speech that Holden gives in the entire novel, and it is entirely consistent with his approach to natural science. The facts of the case come to exist apart from the parties and to “accommodate history” (to serve as a precedent, perhaps) in the form of words (judicial opinions), which are performative “things” that carry the force of law regardless of whether they are understood by the parties. (Ignorance of the law is, after all, no excuse.)

And yet Holden himself later acknowledges the fallacy of this scientific approach. Discoursing on astronomy to the rest of the Glanton gang, the judge again uses legal language to establish his authority, describing the world as an indeterminate “trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent”:

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man’s mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others. ³⁸

In place of the innate “thread of order” painstakingly singled out from the “tapestry” of the universe, Holden now implies law to be an artificial “string in a maze” imposing arbitrary order upon the universe. ³⁹ The real order of existence is unknowable. In a system that knows “neither analogue nor precedent,” law is no more than a prediction of how the string will be unspooled in a particular case.

The judge thus sounds now like no one so much as Holmes, the great debunker of scientific jurisprudence, who in “The Path of the Law” defines law as simply “[t]he prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious.” ⁴⁰ The Langdellian ideal of law as a deduction from first principles was squarely in Holmes’s crosshairs from the opening line of his very first law review article, which asserts that “[i]t is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards.” ⁴¹ Judges in fact “decide on a given state of facts without being very clear as to the ratio decidendi,” and “[i]t is only after a series of determinations on the same subject-matter, that it becomes necessary . . . to state the principle which has until then been obscurely felt.” ⁴² Abstract legal principles are consequently no more than a trend line, Holden’s string in a maze, drawn ex post facto through a body of cases decided for any number of possible reasons. That is the point of Holmes’s most famous line: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” ⁴³ Holmes’s “experience” encompasses all of human culture, including what Holmes calls the “felt necessities of the time,” which he asserts “have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.” ⁴⁴

As Holden collapses the distinction between lawmaking and law-preserving violence, so too does he blend Langdellian formalism and Holmesian realism. Recognizing the randomness of the universe and the illusoriness of precedent, Holden only strives all the more vehemently to impose order on nature by expunging and textualizing its objects. The law he pronounces may be a purely arbitrary ipse dixit, but by annihilating the original “facts” and foreclosing the possibility of any other interpretation, he is able to make his decision final and thus (to echo Justice Jackson) infallible. Eradicating the last “pockets of autonomous life” transforms the judge’s interpretation from his own random “string in a maze” to a seemingly intrinsic “thread of order” that he has singled out from the tapestry of the world. ⁴⁵ And by naturalizing his interpretation, Holden in turn naturalizes his own textual suzerainty over the world, so that he can proclaim that “[w]hat is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ.” ⁴⁶

Holden’s imposition of law is thus intimately bound up with his imperial will-to-power. But there remains something deeper still. As with perhaps his closest literary forebear, Captain Ahab, the judge’s rhetoric is seductive because it speaks to a “little lower layer” of meaning. ⁴⁷ Judge Holden is the incarnation—arguably literature’s supreme incarnation—of the law’s rage for order, a rage that is as much metaphysical as it is juridical. What Holmes said of “the logical method and form” in “The Path of the Law” holds true of Holden’s imprisonment of “autonomous life” within the pages of his notebook: it “flatter[s] that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind,” when in fact “certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.” ⁴⁸ The law answers this deep human longing by offering, as Robert Frost said of poetry, a momentary stay against confusion. It abstracts complex people and events into categories like plaintiff and defendant, cause and effect; it replaces the incommunicable lived experience of pain and suffering with the language of logic and precedent; and it shoehorns unanswerable questions of fate and responsibility into the binary outcomes of guilty or innocent, liable or excused. In so doing, it allays the terror of a random and indifferent universe, the desert of the real envisioned in McCarthy’s correspondingly dispassionate prose as an “optical democracy” in which “no one thing . . . [can] put forth claim to precedence” (the last word particularly suggestive in a legal context) and in which “all preference is made whimsical and a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.” ⁴⁹

If this craving for certainty and meaning can motivate acts of legal (and, for that matter, artistic and religious) creation—in Cover’s phrase, “jurisgenesis”—Judge Holden epitomizes its dark and bloody obverse: the jurispathic impulse to achieve repose by erasing “autonomous life” and its potential for alternative meanings and interpretations. In his final, fatal confrontation with the kid in a Texas saloon, the judge asks rhetorically: “You of all men are no stranger to that feeling, the emptiness and the despair. It is that which we take arms against, is it not? Is not blood the tempering agent in the mortar which bonds?” ⁵⁰ Pointing to an abject man in the saloon who seems “little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all,” Holden again hands down a kind of “judicial opinion” replete with legal terms:

Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail? ⁵¹

For Holden, law is the narrative through which we assign “liens and creditors,” “agency and claimant” to the silent, indeterminate, “unentailed” world—and through which we then “take arms” against the “malign thing” we have constructed. Or to reverse Clausewitz’s famous dictum, law is but another means of war, which Holden worships as his “god” and which he describes as “at last a forcing of the unity of existence,” a unity that is achieved by “the annihilation of the defeated.” ⁵²

Writing of the young Holmes’s traumatic, formative experience in the Civil War, Louis Menand succinctly states the “lesson Holmes took from the war,” a lesson that would inform all of his jurisprudence: “Certitude leads to violence.” ⁵³ I have tried to argue earlier in this text that Blood Meridian, in line with Cover’s diagnosis of the law’s jurispathic tendencies, in fact suggests something closer to the obverse. For Holden, the promise of violence, literal or figurative, is that it will lead to certitude by terminating the process of meaning-making. In the final section, I continue the juxtaposition of Holden and Holmes in a reading of the novel’s epilogue, which I interpret as a much-needed jurisgenerative counterpoise to Holden’s annihilation of autonomy.

III. Epilogue: Moving On

At the end of Blood Meridian, the judge’s triumph seems to be complete. After subjecting the kid to an unspeakably ghastly demise in the saloon outhouse, the naked judge—“huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant”—takes to the dance floor in a grotesque danse macabre, proclaiming triumphantly that he “never sleeps” and, in what appears to be the novel’s final sentence, “that he will never die.” ⁵⁴ After this indelible final image of the judge come the words “THE END,” but on the following page the reader discovers the following one-paragraph, italicized epilogue:

In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground. He uses an implement with two handles and he chucks it into the hole and he enkindles the stone in the hole with his steel hole by hole striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there. On the plain behind him are the wanderers in search of bones and those who do not search and they move haltingly in the light like mechanisms whose movements are monitored with escapement and pallet so that they appear restrained by a prudence or reflectiveness which has no inner reality and they cross in their progress one by one that track of holes that runs to the rim of the visible ground and which seems less the pursuit of some continuance than the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it there on that prairie upon which are the bones and the gatherers of bones and those who do not gather. He strikes fire in the hole and draws out his steel. Then they all move on again. ⁵⁵

This epilogue is the most cryptic passage of an already cryptic novel, and as such, is almost infinitely interpretable. Is it the ultimate “corroboration of the judge’s triumph over the irreducible mystery of the world,” as Dorson contends, or is Mundik correct to claim that “the lone figure of the epilogue saves Blood Meridian from unrelenting nihilism”? ⁵⁶

In line with Dorson’s reading, the nameless man of the epilogue does bear certain resemblances to Judge Holden. His act of “striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there” could be seen as an act of destruction akin to Holden’s jurispathic extermination of “autonomous life.” ⁵⁷ Moreover, like Holden’s juridico-scientific “thread of order,” the holes in the ground purport to be ordered by logic and precedent: they seem to be “the verification of a principle, a validation of sequence and causality as if each round and perfect hole owed its existence to the one before it.” ⁵⁸ The “as if” is crucial: like Holden’s recognition that “the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there,” it implies that the “sequence and causality” are arbitrary rather than intrinsic. ⁵⁹ Once again, the “thread of order” is really an anthropogenic “string in a maze.” ⁶⁰

Yet the man and the wanderers of the epilogue also have a stoical quality wholly absent in the judge. The man’s seemingly perpetual and futile labor calls to mind Camus’s Sisyphus, that paragon of stubborn persistence in the face of the absurd, and his striking of fire is as much an act of creation as it is one of destruction. Indeed, in McCarthy’s later works fire becomes a paramount symbol of continuity, hope, and endurance in a harsh world: No Country for Old Men closes with protagonist Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s gorgeously rendered dream of his father carrying fire through a snowy mountain pass, “fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold,” while the father-and-son protagonists of The Road repeatedly state that they are “carrying the fire” as they journey across a devastated, post-apocalyptic America. ⁶¹ In this context, the fire-striking man can indeed be seen, in Harold Bloom’s words, as “an opposing figure” to the judge and a “new Prometheus . . . rising to go up against him.” ⁶² Moreover, the epilogue can be read as suggesting, contra Holden, that there is an order—albeit inscrutable—both to the universe and to human destiny. The “escapement and pallet” that monitor the wanderers’ movements call to mind the venerable “watchmaker analogy” for intelligent design, implying that the wanderers’ actions are subsumed within a larger cosmic order in which their own volition “has no inner reality.” ⁶³ In this reading, to proceed “as if” the holes in the ground reflect “sequence and causality” is less a jurispathic assertion of order than a gesture of blind faith in the unknowable universal law. The figures “move on” without knowing their ultimate destination.

If the man and wanderers are embodiments of the law, theirs is a law more aligned with Holmes than Holden. To be sure, Holmes’s letters and speeches often strike an anti-anthropocentric tone that rivals that of Blood Meridian itself: in a 1909 letter to his frequent correspondent Lewis Einstein, for instance, the self-proclaimed “bettabilitarian” Holmes (“one who treats the Universe simply as bettable”) questions humanity’s “cosmic importance” and expresses doubt that “a shudder would go through the spheres if the whole ant-heap were kerosened.” ⁶⁴ But if Holmes’s jurisprudence thus proceeds from the same premise as Judge Holden’s, its conclusion is nevertheless diametrically opposite. Where McCarthy’s judge responds to the indifference of the cosmos with jurispathic violence, Holmes, as David Luban writes, paradoxically “found repose” in insignificance and inscrutability, a repose that echoed that of his youthful idol Ralph Waldo Emerson. ⁶⁵ Hence his surprisingly serene tone at the close of a 1918 article attacking the notion of natural law and indeed certainty of any kind, in a passage anticipating Holden’s previously quoted claim that the human mind is “but a fact among others” ⁶⁶ :

It is enough for us that the universe has produced us and has within it, as less than it, all that we believe and love. If we think of our existence not as that of a little god outside, but as that of a ganglion within, we have the infinite behind us. It gives us our only but our adequate significance. A grain of sand has the same, but what competent person supposes that he understands a grain of sand? ⁶⁷

If the “little god outside” is an apt summation of Holden, the would-be suzerain of the universe, the nameless man of Blood Meridian’s epilogue is the ganglion, backed by the infinite to no greater or lesser a degree than a grain of sand—the latter an image that in turn recalls McCarthy’s previously quoted description of the novel’s landscape as an “optical democracy” where “a man and a rock become endowed with unguessed kinships.” ⁶⁸

“We all have cosmic destinies of which we cannot divine the end, if the unknown has ends,” Holmes elsewhere wrote, in a variation on Nietzsche’s amor fati: “Our business is to commit ourselves to life, to accept at once our functions and our ignorance and to offer our heart to fate.” ⁶⁹ Holmes’s characteristic response to the unknowability of ultimate ends was consequently not to write his own desired ends into law but instead (to echo Benjamin in the “Critique”) to imagine a jurisprudence of “pure means,” or as Menand puts it, “to shift the totem of legitimacy from premises to procedures.” ⁷⁰ Holmes’s legal pragmatism is at bottom a doctrine of jurisgenesis—and thus, of democracy. The two defining features of Holmes’s jurisprudential legacy—legislative deference and protection of free speech—both expand rather than constrict social meaning-making: the former on the premise that the Constitution is “made for people of fundamentally differing views” who are entitled to write those divergent views into law, and the latter on the premise that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” ⁷¹ Democracy is at once the means and the only knowable end. “The purpose of the experiment,” as Menand sums up Holmes’s free-speech jurisprudence, “is to keep the experiment going.” ⁷²

In the face of Holden’s tautological violence and his jurispathic narrowing of meaning, Blood Meridian’s epilogue is just such a self-perpetuating jurisgenerative experiment. The final meaning of the passage is that there is no final meaning. In its unresolvable ambiguity and endless interpretability, it presents to the reader the very proliferation of interpretive possibilities—Holmes’s marketplace of ideas, or Cover’s nomoi—that Holden has tried so violently to erase. And in the stoic figures of the man and the wanderers it traces a path of the law markedly different from that of the judge. Whether or not “sequence and causality” are innate is, in the end, immaterial, for the wanderers can proceed as if they are. The law, a tiny ganglion in an infinite universe, need serve no end save its own perpetuation and need look to no destination save for its next step. In a novel that verges again and again on nihilism, this is perhaps McCarthy’s deepest expression of faith. Regardless of logic and precedent, the experiment will keep on going, one case at a time; the law will strike its fire in the hole, draw out its steel, and move on again.