Existing Without Consent: American History and the Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

abstract:This article offers a New Americanist reading that unites the theoretical implications of violence with its political effects to explain how some “ungrievable,” unassimilable populations not only survived historical violence like that which McCarthy chronicles in Blood Meridian, but persisted—even into the present—as living testimonials whose very existence contradicts the implicit narrative created by the judge and the exceptionalist U.S. social, political, and historical narrative he symbolically records and controls. The author argues that McCarthy’s novel offers insight about how subaltern counternarratives are possible despite the judge’s totalizing gaze and control. Furthermore, it illustrates how autonomous individuals like the kid can evade the violence of the nation-state’s totalizing power by refusing to consent to their own subjection.