Judge Holden, Rambling Seducer or Prophet?
Holden's Legacy
Cormac McCarthy scholar Patrick O’Connor while being interviewed on my show told me that he viewed Judge Holden as a rambling seducer of hyper-rationality. However, most common McCarthy fans are seduced by Holden’s philosophy and see him as someone with an accurate perception of reality. But, McCarthy created Holden as the embodiment of a malignant aspect of Nietszche’s philosophy. O’Connor writes that
Holden clearly represents what Nietzsche designates as the nihilism of scientific materialism. For Nietzsche, nihilism denotes very vulgar forms of positivism and materialism, which reject the historical and spiritual dimension of humanity in favour of a crudely materialistic view of life. Holden, as I will argue, elevates this materialistic view of life to its absolute ‘apogee’.
So, why did Cormac create this embodiment of scientific materialism? As a critique or to elevate the position? Around this time McCarthy was hanging around the McCarthy fellows, and finding out firsthand the emotional depravity that exists at the upper echelon of the scientific community. Yet, I also feel like there is a connected thread with Holden’s ideas across all of McCarthy’s works. Lester Ballard, Kenneth Rattner, The Triune, Anton Chigurh, Black, antagonists in the Border Trilogy, and the cannibals in The Road all stand in a similar philosophical lineage.
Some ideas to discuss (if you don’t have anything already)
Did Cormac use scientific materialism as a literary means of just creating vicious and memorable characters? Characters like Holden, Anton, and Lester don’t work with massive streaks of compassion.
Did Cormac use these characters to attack the position?
Or did Cormac believe this is how reality functioned and was writing his truth?
What do you guys think?
The scariest thing about our human predicament is that scientific progress has placed world-ending technologies into the hands of a species that is still just a rung above barbarian apes. Holden seems to embody this dichotomy in a single character. We are both fascinated and terrified that someone could be articulate, learned, skilled, and yet rape, torture, and kill with glee. He is both the nuclear warhead, and the bloodthirsty primate poking at the button. I think it’s likely that McCarthy saw Holden as not one or the other, but a symbol of the awful fact that we contain both. To paraphrase Ernest Becker, we are gods who shit. Trying to square those opposites is an existential mindfuck and the horrifying nature of the character is amplified by exemplifying the extremes of each of these two poles.
My own personal belief is that McCarthy wasn't using characters like Holden or Chigurh to attack scientific materialism so much as he used them as a means to probe and explore the dark corners of that philosophy. It seems to me that he leans that way in his own thinking but set up these characters as antagonists as a sort of check against himself. He recognized the destructive capabilities of such a worldview and writing characters like this probably allowed him to occupy a tension between what he felt was right (his own moral leanings) and what he thought was true (his view of how the world works.)