Books of Judges

I read two books from Little Free Libraries and think about the King James Bible and the U.S. Constitution.

I had never heard of Cormac McCarthy in 2006 when his novel Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness In the West was placed near the top of a New York Times list ranking nominations for “The Best Work of American Fiction of the Last Twenty-Five Years.” Suddenly it seemed as though McCarthy’s name was everywhere, but ultimately I found Blood Meridian to be the sort of book one respects more than enjoys and harbored a nagging frustration with having let McCarthy lose me for about the last fifth of the novel. When I recently came across a pristine, Chip Kidd-designed “25th Anniversary Edition” of Blood Meridian in a Little Free Library I decided to give it a second and final read and, come what may, to make a peace with this most bellicose of novels.

Smarter critics than me have noted that the mercurial, baroque, plodding prose style McCarthy utilizes for the book has a “neo-Biblical” ring to it. Having taken the trouble in the years between my reads of Blood Meridian to read the King James Bible in its entirety, I was struck on this second tour through McCarthy’s novel by the degree to which one portion of the Old Testament in particular can be understood as an antecedent to Blood Meridian not merely in form but in content.

It’s true enough that Judge Holden, the demoniacal figure who stalks the pages of McCarthy’s apocalyptic vision of the American Southwest in the time just after the Mexican-American War, seems to have referents in Conrad’s Kurtz, Melville’s Fedallah and perhaps Milton’s rebel angels. Based on historical legend, McCarthy’s fictionalized version of the Judge is an evil monstrosity who is by far the most worldly, sophisticated and loquacious of the novel’s band of trouble-seeking marauders, a walking paradox who seems to personify one of the book’s central themes. McCarthy opens the book with three epigraphs that, taken together, suggest that the very idea of a civilizing progression away from violence is an insult to human nature. His scalp-hunting Glanton Gang proceed westward on a mercenary project ostensibly intended to help make the area less hazardous for non-native people, but carry with them (and encounter in others) an unquenchable bloodlust that the Judge argues stretches unbroken back to the dawn of humankind and can never be outrun. As the bloodshed in the story crescendos, the Judge says that “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be.” The claustrophobic irony is that these characters are witnessing rapid and costly historical change as participants in a conquest which is nominally in the name of progress but gets more brutal and atavistic the further west they go.

Along with the King James-like syntax and comparably high rate of indecipherably antiquated terminology, there are a number of explicit Biblical references in McCarthy’s text, but the most apt one is lurking in plain sight. In the Old Testament my imagination was most viscerally captivated by the Book of Judges, in which the narrative’s chosen people do wrong in the eyes of their Chooser and are punished with threats to their survival from hostile neighbors. In these fights the Biblical Israelites are represented by a succession of “Judges,” great warriors who perform increasingly elaborate deeds of violent heroism on their behalf. The Book of Judges doesn’t have the philosophical depth of Genesis, the abiding wisdom of Ecclesiastes or the lyrical beauty of the Song of Songs, but for bone-crunching, creatively gory and downright bizarre scenes of action and violence you just can’t beat it. Ehud stabs a knife so deeply into a “very fat” assassination target that it disappears into the man’s body. Jael fulfills a prophecy of a woman’s victory in battle by using a hammer to nail an enemy commander’s head to the floor of his tent. Gideon is instructed by the Lord to prove his faith by facing down thousands of enemy combatants with just three hundred fighters and to know which three hundred to select by choosing “Every one that lappeth of the water with his tongue, as a dog lappeth.” Samson uses his mighty strength to pull down two great pillars to sacrifice his own life and take three thousand enemy Philistines with him. This material could be reinterpreted into a great action picture — or, for that matter, a nightmare adventure story of baptism through violence in the Old West.

The characters in the Book of Judges are living in what the physicist David Deutsch in his book The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World calls a static society, “one whose changes happen on a timescale longer than its members can notice,” where no individual human can live long enough to observe any noteworthy evolution in the way things are done. But even amidst the unforgiving pace of upheaval in the clashing cultures of Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s Judge Holden suggests, for example through the study of ancient arrowheads from long-forgotten battles or of “the footpiece from a suit of armor hammered out in a shop in Toledo three centuries before,” that humans in the nineteenth century are just as red in tooth and claw as they were in the centuries before Christ, and the centuries before those. McCarthy even strains to outdo the Biblical Judges with the feats of carnage of Blood Meridian’s competing bands of warriors, depicting scalpings, decapitations, battle sodomy, live burnings, mass shootings, murdered infants and still greater horrors. The choice of the figure of Judge Holden to convey the view that the only authentic man is he “who has offered himself up entire to the blood of war” and “learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart” is too pointed to be unintentional, and McCarthy seems too competent in his style and allusions not to have had older Judges than Holden on his mind. I’ve made my rapprochement with Blood Meridian, but I keep a King James Bible on the premises and I’ll be locked in combat with the original Book of Judges for a while yet.

Another good recent Little Free Library find was Constitution Illustrated by R. Sikoryak. (Somehow I lucked upon a copy of this 2020 release in condition as fine as the above-mentioned copy of Blood Meridian.) I think every American should have a copy of the Constitution within grabbing distance, and the Penguin Civic Classics edition edited by Richard Beeman is a great version for you squares who don’t want your Constitution in comics form. But I say you might as well go for one that’s irresistibly fun to absorb and comprises a dazzling show of skill by one of the best cartoonists working.

Sikoryak is a protean mischief-maker with a two-pronged approach — an astonishing flair for flawlessly and reverentially imitating any other cartoonist throughout the history of the medium, and a breadth of literary and historical knowledge that allows him to pair a given cartoonist’s stock-in-trade with precisely the right canonical text to create a mash-up pastiche that subversively enlivens an understanding of both sources. The concept would dive-bomb if Sikoryak lacked either the technical skill to make the work look as if it really was created by the artists to whom he’s paying tribute or the sophistication to comment incisively upon the classic texts he’s interpreting, but he doesn’t miss a step on either score. There’s simply no other artist like him in any medium, and he makes it look so effortless that the scope of what he’s up to can be hard to see if you’re not already in the know. A friend idly thumbing through my copy of Constitution Illustrated remarked that “they got a lot of heavy hitters” for the book. “Just one,” I said.

Constitution Illustrated differs from some of Sikoryak’s earlier work by choosing a single source text, the Constitution of the United States of America, and imitating a different cartoonist with each turn of the page, proceeding thusly through each Preamble, Article and Amendment for a quick and dirty tour of American political history and survey of the modern history of the comics medium — see Beetle Bailey and company instantiating Congress’s power “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union,” Lucy Van Pelt exclaiming the text of the First Amendment or a drunken Homer Simpson gleefully chugging an illicit six-pack at the addition of the Eighteenth. There are cleverly-deployed references to old newspaper comics masters like Winsor McCay and George Herriman, iconic mainstream characters like Barbie and Uncle Scrooge, underground provocateurs like Art Spiegelman and Gary Panter and up-to-the-minute franchises like Rick and Morty and Steven Universe. It’s amazing how much frivolity and insight Sikoryak packs into this slim volume, which has the highest fun-to-page ratio of anything I’ve read in 2021 so far. It’s a sublime exercise in craft and a rollickingly playful reminder that the American ship of state has navigated rockier shoals than the ones upon which our Republic currently appears to be foundering.