How to Write Cormac McCarthy's Judge

What separates Blood Meridian from most contemporary fiction.

If you want to improve the quality of your fiction beyond that possible in traditional publishing, you have to pinpoint the weaknesses baked into its philosophy. One way to do that is check ourselves when we complain that fiction isn’t what it used to be. There are high points, you say, but in general, there’s something missing.

The question is: what?

Before I propose one such weakness, allow me to toss this hand grenade: The Judge from Blood Meridian was a moral creature, and I’ll explain why at the end.

An Emptiness in Contemporary Fiction

I enjoy a little study of philosophy, but moral philosophy bores me to tears.

I have an extremely religious background, but I’ve always been repulsed by Christian movies, to the point of a knee-jerk anger response when, as an adult, I continuously found myself compelled to sit through these films. It was so bad that I attempted a self-directed form of exposure therapy and spent a month watching them as my only entertainment, and in the end, found a few I actually appreciated.

This is my background, so when I say we’re addressing a fictional character’s standard of morality, understand that I mean none of this.

You might point out how something I discuss here relates to moral philosophy or religious storytelling, but that’s not where we’re coming from, what we’re aiming for, nor what we need to study to get where we need to be.

Morality in the real world isn’t the point, and the issues of the day have nothing to do with a fictional character’s morality unless that’s relevant to the story. This isn’t a self-insert. It isn’t preaching. It isn’t even philosophizing.

And I’m beginning to understand how underutilized but vital morality is in fiction. It’s that thing we sense is missing from contemporary fiction but cannot name.

What is Your Character’s Moral Standard?
What is Their Moral Dilemma?

Morality in fiction is a reasoned and consistent choice in response to a challenging circumstance. It might be the reason to do that hard thing, but it also might be the reason why doing something is hard—because it breaks a moral standard.

We might never see a character’s reasoning, but we see the actions. We see the choices, and we see that pattern of choices challenged at a key point in the story.

In Boule de Suif (Ball of Fat) by Guy de Maupassant, the main character is a prostitute in wartime, and she draws a moral line at (ahem) aiding and abetting the enemy. The point of the story isn’t whether it’s wrong to sleep with the enemy, but her moral dilemma is the climax of the story and highlights the hypocrisy that is the point of de Maupassant’s tale.

People talk a great deal about a character’s want and need, and in some cases, that discussion has mutated into a focus on the character’s dilemma. It’s a choice between sacrifices. You can only make the one choice, and something has to give.

That change might be an acknowledgement of what’s missing from our stories and characters: a non-emotional, reasoned conviction that is part of the story’s conflict and climax, whether that climactic solution is holding to the conviction or finding reason enough to break it.

However, I should treat the want / need / dilemma issue as something separate, although related. The need is likely to touch upon a character’s reason for breaking a moral code—or her want impacts her reason for holding to the cold, even though it costs her what she wants.

It’s not an emotionally based choice, either. The moral standard holds true no matter how she feels, but it’s challenged, for example, when holding to it creates a greater evil. Think of Huckleberry Finn struggling with the society-indoctrinated idea that assisting a runaway slave is a sin. He decides that helping Jim is the right thing, even if it sends him to hell.

Huck breaks that standard fairly early in the story, and that’s fitting for an outwardly imposed moral code, his rebellious nature, and the needs of the story.

We have moved away from characters having moral standards because of postmodernism’s stance on the grand narrative, but not only are we beyond the postmodern age, the moral stance need not have anything to do with our grandest of narratives like religion or country.

Think of how you grew up and your family’s stance on punctuality. It taught you a moral code, whether that being on time was a virtue or that people who worried about such things were uptight and repressed. Whichever way you were raised, that arbitrary point became a standard of morality, and then you married someone who was raised in that other kind of family.

The horror.

It would be a challenge to make a story where the moral dilemma was punctuality, but you get the idea. A moral certainty is an absolute in the character’s eyes, but that absolute need not be absolute to anyone else. Based on their history and influences, this is their reasoned stance and before it’s challenged within the story, it’s unflappable.

Unless, the character’s moral uncertainty is the point, and he fails to live up to a standard he believes in but can’t hold until the ultimate choice must be made and he lives up to the standard at the moment it costs him the most.

Maybe you’ll even find another approach.

And maybe there is no moral dilemma in your story. The character can still be driven by moral certainties, and that’s true of your main character and obstacle characters. If your character’s want is in conflict with his father’s moral certainty, there’s little room to argue out of that conflict.

Your character might be heroic, and her virtues are based on reasoned absolutes. Your character might be a villain, and her vices are based on reasoned absolutes.

Old-school morality has caused problems in the real world. Driven by errant “absolutes”, moral people do wicked things. The distaste for morality is near…absolute?…in our society, but that repulsion is a mirage. We all still have a sense of morality and absolutes whether we acknowledge them or not, but because we refuse to acknowledge them, we don’t acknowledge morality in our fiction either.

If you find yourself thinking there’s something missing in contemporary fiction, if there’s a weakness to a story’s central conflict compared to your favorite tales from days of yore—it may very well be that there’s something watered-down in a story whose sense of right and wrong is purely based on how it makes the character feel.

If there’s a chance this might be true, then its worth exploring as part of our push toward quality beyond that exemplified in traditional publishing. It’s a remnant of postmodernism that contemporary fiction needs to move past to reclaim its strength.

The Morality of the Judge

Judge Holden is evil. Some think he’s the devil walking the earth, and to say that the Judge is a moral creature is to suggest that the devil himself is too. The very idea is repulsive.

But morality is about standards by which a person lives and by which they judge themselves justified. The Judge kills the boy because the boy offended his sense of morality, and as evil a man as he was, the Judge had a catalog of speeches explaining that morality.

Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

That quote is a moral standard by which certain acts are not only justified by required. He doesn’t kill because of how he feels about you in the moment, at least, not usually. He kills because in his view of himself and the world, it wouldn’t be right to let you live—much as society would gladly see him hanged.

Morality is our attempt to live rightly in this world, but to be moral only means to be guided by a reasoned and absolute standard. It’s doesn’t mean you’re right. It’s doesn’t mean your good.

It doesn’t mean you’re not the devil incarnate.

—Thaddeus Thomas