Judge Holden is purportedly a historical person, a murderer who partnered with John Joel Glanton as a professional scalp-hunter in Mexico and the American South-West during the mid-19th century. To date, the only source for Holden's existence is Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession: Recollections of a Rogue, an autobiographical account of Chamberlain's life as a soldier during the Mexican–American War. Chamberlain described Holden as well-spoken, intelligent, and physically quite large, as well as perhaps the most ruthless of the roving band of mercenaries led by Glanton, with whom Chamberlain briefly traveled after the war. He was popularized as the main antagonist of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.
Historical basis
In Samuel Chamberlain's autobiographical My Confession, he describes Holden:
''Blood Meridian''
A fictionalized Holden is a central character in Cormac McCarthy's 1985 Western novelBlood Meridian. In the novel, he and Glanton are the leaders of a pack of nomadic criminals who rob, rape, torture, and kill across the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. Throughout the novel, Holden brutally murders dozens of people, including children. Finding verification of Holden's existence has been a hobby for some Cormac McCarthy scholars. As depicted in Blood Meridian, Holden is a mysterious figure, a cold-blooded killer, and, it is implied, a child-rapist; aside from the children he openly kills, he is seen enticing children with sweets, and a child often goes missing when he is in the vicinity. At one point in the novel, he is seen naked with a naked twelve-year-old girl in his room. Holden displays a preternatural breadth of knowledge, including paleontology, archaeology, linguistics, law, technical drawing, geology, chemistry, prestidigitation, and philosophy. He is described as seven feet tall and completely bereft of body hair, including eyebrows and eyelashes. He is massive in frame, enormously strong, an excellent musician and dancer, a fine draftsman, exceptionally articulate and persuasive in several languages, and an unerring marksman. His skin is so pale as to have almost no pigment. This strange appearance, as well as his keen, extremely fast reflexes, strength, agility, apparent immunity to sleep and aging, and multifarious other abilities point to his being something other than a normal human. In the final pages of the novel, McCarthy makes more direct reference to the Judge as a supernatural entity, or even as a concept personified. In 2002, Book magazine rated Holden as the 43rd greatest character in fiction since 1900. He is regarded as one of the greatest character of modern literature, likened to a "Captain Ahab of the desert." Harold Bloom described him as "short of Moby Dick, the most monstrous apparition in all of American literature."
Scholarly debate
In his essay "Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy", literature professor Leo Daugherty argued that McCarthy's Holden is—or at least embodies—a gnostic archon, a kind of demon. Harold Bloom, who declared McCarthy's Holden to be "the most frightening figure in all of American literature", has even come to regard The Judge as immortal. However, unlike Daugherty, Bloom argues that The Judge defies identification as any being under any "system" such as Gnosticism, citing the passage in the book stating that there was no "system by which to divide back into his origins". Rather, Bloom "resort" to literary comparison with Shakespeare'sIago, a methodical dispenser of strife.
