Historical Allusion

HISTORICAL ALLUSION

Judge Holden. Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession (a non-fictional memoir of Samuel Chamberlain's adventures) speaks of :

Judge Holden of Texas, a gigantic, hairless man. Who or what he was no one knew, but a more cool-blooded villain never went unhung. Always cool and collected, but when a quarrel took place and blood shed, his hoglike eyes would gleam with a sullen ferocity worthy of the countenance of a fiend...He was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico. He conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the harp or guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance, out-waltz any poblano of the ball, plum centre with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in geology and mineralogy, with all an errant coward, but not that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone where he had the advantage and strength stealing weapons, but where the combat would be equal he would avoid it if possible.

Now Blood Meridian's version of Judge Holden:

An enormous man had entered the tent and removed his hat. He was as bald as a stone and he had no trace of beard and he had no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them. He was close to seven feet in height...(6).

[Judge Holden] adduced for their consideration references to the children of Ham, the lost tribes of the Israelites, certain passages from the Greek poets, anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assessment of racial traits with respect to climactic and geographical considerations (84).

[Judge Holden] pointed to that stark and solitary mountain and delivered himself an oration to what end I know not, then or now, and he concluded with the tellin us that our mother the earth as he said was round like an egg and contained all good things within her (130).

As you can see, McCarthy took the Judge's physical attributes, the gigantic size, the hairlessness, and characteristics such as his multi-lingual capabilities, musical talent, and historical, literary and botanical knowledge directly from My Confession. This poses the question: What does it mean that McCarthy has modeled his character so directly from historical fact? I assert that McCarthy is creating links to the past in order to place his novel into history. He will accompany this with literary and biblical allusion, which I will discuss later. Why he does this is something else I will get to in a later post.