There’s such an emphasis on clothes in Westerns, Blood Meridian being no different. Boots, hats, shirts, coats, jackets, uniforms, armour, trousers, all in a variety of materials ranging from the finest silks to the toughest rawhide; in a setting so harsh as the Southwest, riding between scorching days and freezing nights, there’s a necessity for layers. Clothes are a barrier between their wearers and the elements they face, a thin cloak of whatever you can scrap together at times being the only thing between another night alive or freezing to death out on the mesa.
Clothes are a means of survival, but they are also an important wall against the touch of other men. And, in a world so hostile as the one in Blood Meridian, where flesh (out on the landscape, at least) is only ever bared by force, Judge Holden's nakedness is not only a visual assault . . . but a challenge.
The judge is a character entirely comprised of contradictions. An oversized cherub with the strength to crush human skulls with just his hands (hands that, mind you, are disproportionately smaller compared to the rest of his immense person), McCarthy goes to great pains to render Holden in an uncannily soft light. Roaming the desert, he is compared to rubbery sea creatures (a dolphin and a manatee), his lips 'oddly childish' and his face 'serene and strangely childlike'. Where other men sneer from their seats in murky cantina corners, the judge dances, and when he dances he pirouettes 'hugely on his mincing feet'. He is overwhelmingly masculine in his mastery of all colonial talents (hunting, scalping, the Western sciences) and yet strangely effeminate in his conduct, in the 'surprisingly petite' toe he dips in the bathwater in Chihuahua, or in his cat like reflexes during a bar fight in Nácori, or in his pale, hairless complexion, or, perhaps most chilling of all (to the hermetic, scowling group of individuals in the Glanton Gang, at least) his smile.
The Glanton Gang prize being shielded, so much so that they wear the body parts of other men (Toadvine's necklace of teeth, Bathcat's necklace of ears) and deck their horses 'in human hair and teeth and skin'. Their entire business, in fact, is the exposing of other people for money: the scalping of Native Americans. In a company of men layered so thickly in the skins and furs of slaughtered beasts and men, the judge's nakedness commands both attention and aversion, impossible to ignore and yet equally as difficult to dispute, because who on earth would nominate themselves to be the one to tell the 7ft behemoth to put some clothes on? They would sooner dress a boulder than Holden, and in turn clothing the judge does little else than remind the reader of his equal comfort out of a suit than in one.
Similarly, with our reasonable assumption of the judge being a child predator, his nakedness poses an impossibly more evil threat to the kid. Whereas other depictions of child predators in mainstream-media, both fictional and real, largely balk at showing them in stages of nudity, for fear of too-readily calling to mind the violence they've enacted upon their victims, McCarthy does not shy from this with Holden. The judge is persistently described as naked because his assaults are not covert but repulsively overt. Nudity in the Southwest is reserved for brothels and baths, yet the judge insists on baring himself whenever it pleases him, seemingly always, to put it bluntly, ready for action. To see him in a suit is only an assurance that he will soon rid himself of it once enough debauchery has accrued for the night. Such is his power that the kid refuses to shoot him even when Tobin insists in his ear: 'He is naked. He is unarmed. God's blood, do you think you'll best him any other way? Do it, lad. Do it for the love of God. Do it or I swear your life is forfeit.'
The judge's nudity is his most striking visual offence. It conveys a level of unabashed openness that is perhaps best encapsulated in his final moments, in the snapshot of him before the man, arms long and white and open wide, crushing our protagonist up in an embrace that, we can only assume (and, for the man's benefit) suffocates him instantly.
