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I saw the world go up in flames

Prof. Hungerford supposes why for this small act Ham was cursed whilst his brothers were blessed: “I think it’s because in seeing the father naked, you see the mystery of your origin. And so, the kid is likened to someone cursed for looking upon their origin.”

Hungerford goes on to interpret the kid’s curse as not for knowing his origin but forgetting it. After fleeing his father’s house, healing from his first near-fatal wound and heading for Texas, he is now “finally divested of all that he has been.” Indeed, after this line he is no longer referred to as “the child” but as the kid, his new address signifying a complete severance from his sparse and faded origins in the book’s opening.

Hungerford goes into this in more detail in the second half of her lecture, but what she doesn’t go into that I found really interesting, is that the kid was never confronted with his father’s nakedness, and so how could he be cursed for forgetting what he never learned of in the first place? The origins he does witness, however, are in another naked father: the judge.

Frequently throughout the novel, Holden is described as either half naked or fully nude. The kid and the rest of the gang are forced often to witness their new origins instilled in that broad and pale and fleshy form. And, unlike Noah, this witnessing is not accidental, rather it is imposed upon the crew and, in more severe instances, literally forced upon the local children the judge encounters, their own burgeoning origins snuffed out by his void-like self.

Unlike the kid, he has no clear origin and is written separate from his obscure antecedents, for “he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back to them for he would not go.” Not only does the judge have no traceable origin, but he would refuse to be confined to them, likely out a loathing he harbours for things categorised by anyone other than himself. With his full lips and small extremities, he presents simultaneously as the child, the father and the man, his soft features at odds with his more unnatural attributes.

Like the son of the murdered traveller in the judge’s harnessmaker’s tale, the kid (brooding with “a taste for mindless violence” from his earliest childhood) grows likewise to become “a killer of men.” But, unlike the traveller’s son, he does not carry “before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain,” for the kid’s father was a drunken lout quoting from dead poets. Instead the kid’s idol dances before him in the figure of the judge. The judge proclaims that “the death of the father [is] to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods,” and yet the judge claims he will never die, much less divulge to anyone “the small mean ways” that might temper him, if any such things have even occurred to him. The kid, then, “is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way.” The judge is immortal, frozen like the ideal of the traveller in his son. He never fails, and so in this new origin the kid can never hope to piece together some meagre acceptance of his new origin, for his origin proceeds him, not precedes. Imagine trying to become better than your father, except your father is not dead and in fact outlives you, continually surpassing you in every aspect.

The judge declares to the gang that tracing one’s origins is as futile as attempting to chart the world’s truth, of which is nothing more than “a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream [. . .] having neither analogue nor precedent“, and as he collects, notes and destroys centuries-old artefacts, he likewise flattens the world’s origins into a tabula rasa upon which he, with his ledger book, is suzerain.

HEAVILY INSPIRED BY THOMAS BLACKSHEAR ART!!