Well, I’ve finished the novel. It was late at night so I have to try and remember
how it all transpired.
First impressions. The novel, the story, the setting and the characters became
more raw, more fundamental, more exposed in their essence as the novel
progressed.
The main character – John Grady Cole – a young man trying to live the mythical
life of the cowboy of earlier eras, is stoical, honest almost to a fault, loyal, brave
and silent. All of his actions, including returning to his loved one (who spurns
him in favor of her father’s authority), seeking revenge on a corrupt police chief,
getting shot in the leg, trying to return a horse to its owner and re-uniting with
his lost partner, all these actions seem to come to naught. Like the many sunsets
in the text, his actions, purpose and sense of self are on the wane and almost
gone from the modern world. This raises questions of what we have lost in our
technological new world, what the past was really like in the American West and
the nature of the mythological cowboy who, more than likely, was unlike the
upright and moral John Grady.
The landscape, more than any other novel I have read (except for McCarthy’s
other novels), is crucial to the meaning, mood and tone of the text. It is raw,
brutal, inhospitable, largely unlivable, dry desert that reflects and shapes the
lives of the characters. By necessity, characters are reduced to their essence, they
are tested by the land and they either survive (damaged and changed
irrevocably) or they die or give up and leave (to summarize the fates of the other
two main characters). The deserts of Texas and northern Mexico deny
extravagance and excess in people and things and demand single-mindedness,
pragmatism and brutal self-interest for surviving and thriving.
Of the three novels of McCarthy’s that I have now read there is no major female
character. I’m sure this is considered a fault, or lack of understanding of human
nature, by many critics, but I don’t. For me it just means that he writes about
what he knows. He knows the hearts and minds of men and can show them in all
their evil, selfishness, violence and single-mindedness. If I want to understand
women I’ll read Toni Morrison. I guess it prevents him from ever being the
greatest of American writers, though.
Did I enjoy it? Absolutely. It takes some time to get used to his style and content,
but once immersed, it takes hold of you and destroys all notions of normal life.
And those sentences. If any teacher bangs on to you about run on sentences send
them straight to McCarthy. Observe:
‘In his sleep he could hear the horses stepping among the rocks and he could
hear them drink from the shallow pools in the dark where the rocks lay smooth
and rectilinear as the stones of ancient ruins and the water from their muzzles
dripped rang like water dripping in a well and in his sleep he dreamt of horses
and the horses in his dream moved gravely among the tilted stones like horse
come upon an antique site where some ordering of the world had failed and if
anything had been written on the stones the weathers had taken it away again
and carrying in their blood as they did the recollection of this and other places
where horses once had been and would be again. Finally what he saw in his
dream was that the order in the horse’s heart was more durable for it was
written in a place where no rain could erase it.’ (p 287)
The first thing you notice, of course, is the sheer length of the first sentence. For
me, it accords a tone of melancholy, of Biblical importance, of pondering on the
vastness of things known and unknown. This is helped by the repetition within
the sentence of the horses. This sentence has a depth to it that is hard to
calculate. The references to ancient ruins, water dripping in a well, shallow pools
in the dark, antique site, weather taking away writing on stones bring to the
boy’s sleep an almost infinite amount of time and darkness. The phrase ‘where
some ordering of the world had failed’ is typical McCarthy. It suggests a universe
without meaning, order or sense. Possibly not even that – that the meaning has
failed, that whatever or whoever has created the world has failed in their
attempt and that the lonely human being wandering in the desert is symbolic of
this emptiness of meaning in the universe. But then, the order is there – in the
hearts of horses – not man. A horse is loyal, strong and untainted by the more
undesirable of human traits. The horse – the symbol of the American West and
the cowboy era – has a universality that will out-survive human beings. Why?
Because it is not human, primarily, but also because of its constancy of spirit –
the cowboy era may have disappeared but the horse is still there.
And this, this monstrosity of a sentence and its meaning, is the essence of what I
love about McCarthy – frail humanity, a vast meaningless universe,
overwhelming human emotions brought to naught, a landscape millions of years
more experienced than humans, all in a prose that breaks those stupid rules I
tried not to learn in school.
Hmm, narrative and literary devices? Symbolism. (I think symbolism is my new
favorite thing)
Horses? Well, they usually equate to sexuality and primal human desires (see D.
H. Lawrence, esp. The Rainbow for endless examples), but here it is more about
their qualities and how they symbolize a passing era. Towards the end there are
a couple of times when John Grady and his horse are almost knocked over by
cars speeding by – symbolic, huh?
Sunsets. Millions of them in this book. Day passing, era passing, sun going down
on a lifestyle, the passing of particular values and ideals that John Grady is trying
to hang on to. At the end, Grady rides into a sunset with no purpose or
destination.
Desert. Landscape. Most of the story takes place outside. The two main
characters spend some time in prison. The place is hardly described at all, yet
almost every rock and cactus in the desert gets a paragraph. The prison is
nothing more than the sum of the fear and violence in the hearts of the men
inside it. It is about survival through murder whereas the desert is about survival
through self-knowledge.
Authority figures. All of the authority figures – the police, his lover’s father, the
government of Mexico – are evil, corrupt and defy the good guy at every turn. He
cannot, and does not win against them. Grady, is fighting a losing battle, not just
against the passing of an era, but also against humanity at large. He loses, but
survives alone.
Water. Survival, love, beginnings. Usual stuff.
Death. The novel starts and finishes with funerals. A boy is executed, someone
murdered. A way of life. Love dies unnaturally – it is murdered by the refusal of
the father to let his daughter meet John Grady.
There are more of course.
Would it make a good film? Probably. Filmmakers seem to have discovered
McCarthy recently – The Road and No Country For Old Men (brilliant) have been
made for the screen. I don’t think Oprah would like it though.
Could it be taught at IB level. Absolutely. Why?
The quality of the writing – the literary devices, those sentences, the use of
landscape as a central image and more.
The content – the depiction of man as almost without hope, and few redeeming
qualities. These are things that I love to teach innocent children about.
More to come about plot, characterization, the use of Spanish dialogue and the
lack of female characters.
I think it’s worth leaving the novel alone for a week or so and then come back for
some further thoughts (if any happen to appear in a brain in holiday mode)