"Some degenerate entrepreneur fleeing from a medicine show": Judge Holden in the Age of P.T. Barnum

Abstract

Judge Holden exerts a tremendous pull on the interpretive energies of Blood Meridian's readers. Enigmatic in speech and spectacular in appearance, he overwhelms with apparent significance: he is one whose very portent renders [him] ambiguous. Like things so charged with meaning that their forms are dimmed (McCarthy 282). This meaning-dimmed form provokes in McCarthy criticism an array of interpretations-literary, theological, and symbolic. He is Ahab and Whale, Iago and Macbeth; a Gnostic archon and Shiva the destroyer; the personification of Enlightenment rationalism, Nietzschean nihilism, or Manifest Destiny; the devil himself or culture itself.1 However, to summon Melville once more, I would focus less on the Whiteness of the Whale than on the judge as a Confidence Man, Blood Meridian his masquerade. From his debut disrupting Reverend Green's tentshow to his curtain call fiddling in the whorehouse at Fort Griffin, Holden performs magic tricks and feats of strength, humbugs and hawks tales, tells fortunes and gives lectures, exhibits novelties and freak-show grotesqueries.2 He displays these trappings in a text that is highly invested in contemporaneous dynamics of vision and illusion, and in economic and epistemic deception. These historical concerns inform not only Blood Meridian's content but also its style, as the novel likewise stages the consumption of aestheticized spectacle. Locating the judge more concretely within antebellum entertainment and attendant practices of artful deception, I will read Blood Meridian as producing an account of consumption of imperial violence as sensational entertainment that remains pertinent today.the will to deceive that is in all things luminousIn corners of the United States in the 1840s remote from the world of Blood Meridian, arts of deception ruled the day: counterfeiting was endemic, the confidence man emerged as label and literary figure, magic became a respected profession, the Fox sisters and Davenport brothers ushered in the Spiritualism craze, and P.T. Barnum ruled entertainment and pioneered modern advertising.3 Between 1835 and 1850 Barnum rose from Connecticut lottery agent to international celebrity as the quintessential American (Harris 56). His hugely successful Museum contained freaks and prodigies, lectures and plays, wonders natural and faked, menageries, panoramas, and magic lantern shows, not to mention a host of fortune-tellers, phrenologists, jugglers and other purveyors of tricks who hawked their goods within. Unifying this disparate array were Barnum's rhetorical pyrotechnics. Not only were his promises outrageous, his advertising relentless, his trickery shameless, he also made his own double-dealing part of the attraction by constantly calling attention to his ruses. Terrence Whelan refers to Barnum's self-reflexivity as capitalist irony, a mode of profiting both from perpetrating illusions and from subsequently exposing and mocking them (xvi). More generally, Neil Harris dubs Barnum's method the aesthetic:The objects inside the museum, and Barnum's activities outside, focused attention on their own structures and operations, were empirically testable, and enabled-or at least invited-audiences and participants to learn how they worked. They appealed because they exposed their processes of action. (57)The operational aesthetic emphasized formal workings while downplaying specific content, so that worries about the humbug's motives could be displaced by preoccupation with his technique (Lears 70). Deception itself, stylized or cleverly perpetrated, could thus be worth the price of a ticket. Barnum defined humbug as putting on glittering appearances-outside show-novel expedients, by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear, prior to giving them the full equivalent for their money (Saxon 77). Both humbug and the operational aesthetic (its natural ally) fundamentally privilege spectacle over specific content, and depend upon novelty and hype. …