PT Journal (Analytic)
AU Gleeson-White, Sarah
AT Playing Cowboys: Genre, Myth, and Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (Nonfiction)
CT Southwestern American Literature
CY 2007
LW 23
DB Literature Resource Center
XX Service Name: Gale
XX Date of Access: 03 December 2010
IL
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?&id=GALE%7CA207324339&v=2.1&u=phoe84216&it=r&p=
LitRC&sw=w
DI GALE|A207324339
RM COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale
SN 00491675
SU Western fiction
SU All the Pretty Horses (Novel)
SU McCarthy, Cormac
TX As Cormac McCarthy moved from the South to the Southwest in the 1970s, so did the
settings and associated meanings of his novels. His first Western novel, Blood Meridian
or the Evening Redness in the West (1985), retained his exclusive, small readership.
However, when All the Pretty Horses, the first novel of the Border Trilogy, was
published seven years later, it received unprecedented--for McCarthy--commercial
success and went on to win both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics
Circle Award for fiction.
Perhaps the radical change in his publishing fortunes can be attributed to the fact
that with All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy was writing within an internationally
recognized and popular genre: the Western. In a 1992 inter view just before the
release of All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy claimed that he has "always been interested
in the Southwest .... There isn't a place in the world you can go where they don't
know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West" (7). Eight years before
the publication of All the Pretty Horses, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove won the
Pulitzer Prize and was later made into a successful television miniseries. At the
same time, the dry spell in the production of Hollywood Westerns seemed to be coming
to an end with the release of Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990) and Clint
Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992).
Historians also once more turned their attention to the West to write the New Western
histories. Patricia Nelson Limerick, Donald Worster, and Richard White focused on
what the West as a place means and, in doing so, stoutly challenged Frederick Jackson
Turner and his disciples' idea of the West that had dominated Western studies for
nearly a century. In 1992, the same year that All the Pretty Horses was published
and Unforgiven was released, Worster wrote: "Today the history of the American West
is undergoing a thunderous reawakening, drawing attention from journalists, film-makers,
novelists, and undergraduates as well as a new generation of scholars" (viii). And
of course, the United States had its own cowboy-actor president throughout the 1980s;
Ronald Reagan even created a new Frontier, this time in space, which he named after
the sci-fi Western movie, Star Wars (1977). The time of the Western had come once
more, and Cormac McCarthy's post-Suttree novels are very much a part of its re-emergence.
Critic Robert Brinkmeyer has identified several other contemporary Southern writers
whose writing imaginatively inhabits the West and convincingly accounts for this
phenomenon in terms of escape:
No doubt the cultural dynamics of this shift are complex and
L.] Johnson [in New Westers] is probably right
imaginative lightin out to the
what is perceived
myriad, but [Michael
in suggesting that the recent
Western frontier is in large part a response to
as the increasing dehumanization and homogenization of postmodern
culture. (1)
In this essay, I explore what McCarthy does with the Western genre by focusing on
what I consider to be his most self-conscious and self-reflexive Western novel,
All the Pretty Horses. In McCarthy's hands, the Western obtains its meaning from
its pattern of radical escape, not only from a consumerist, post-war culture but
also, ultimately, from history itself, into myth. The Western--as both cinematic
and literary forms--always and necessarily evokes agrarianism, masculine autonomy,
and the strenuous life: the seminal tropes of American nationhood. The irony here,
however, is that these pre-modern national myths have always been disseminated by
what Richard Slotkin, in his massive Gunfighter Nation, calls "industrial popular
culture"--the dime novel, the nineteenth-century historical romance, the stage melodrama,
the Wild West Show, the movie, the modern paperback, and the TV miniseries" (25).
McMurtry is wrong, then, to claim that pulp fiction and Hollywood have "trivialized
and cheapened" this pastoral ideal, since these are the very sites of the creation
and propagation of that ideal (18). It is in the space of the West that myth and
mass culture intriguingly combine to become substitutes for history. And this is
the very trajectory that All the Pretty Horses traces, in its drive to sidestep
modernity and move into an ahistorical West.
The Western has always had a particular and problematic relationship to history;
it employs myth to interpret and then disseminate it. As Slotkin observes, "The
West was already a mythologized space when the first moviemakers found it [c. 1903,
with The Great Train Robbery], and early Westerns built directly on the formulas,
images and allegorizing traditions of the Wild West show and cheap literature" (234).
In other words, the idea of the West, and in turn the Western, is an overwhelmingly
significant site where myth and history merge. Turner's famous paper, "The Significance
of the Frontier in American History" (1893), is to a great extent responsible for
the ongoing myth-making tendency of Western narratives. For Turner, the Frontier--that
appealingly and frighteningly vulnerable border between savagery and civilization--was
the central process in the development of the American character, American democracy,
in fine, American exceptionalism. Over time, the originary narrative of the Frontier
and the West becomes, as Slotkin writes,
increasingly conventionalized and abstracted until it is reduced to
a deeply
encoded and resonant set of symbols, "icons," "keywords," or historical cliches....
Each of these mythic icons is in effect a
and compression and a
historical
poetic construction of tremendous economy
mnemonic device capable of evoking a complex system of
associations by a single image or phrase. (6)
I argue that All the Pretty Horses depends for its meaning on just such Western
"icons" and "keywords." Indeed, we need to know in advance what the West itself
represents: masculine freedom, escape from "sivilization" and the domestic, the
natural life, and violence. At the same time, and this is the crux of my argument
here, McCarthy's Western lays bare the process of this kind of highly coded myth-making.
(1) Because All the Pretty Horses inhabits a genre as historically formulaic as
the Western, it can with some ease play up its constitutive codes. As I will go
on to explore, the way in which McCarthy makes his Western reveals the complicity
of industrial popular culture in the practice of cultural myth-making.
That All the Pretty Horses is in fact a Western demands qualification. Some critics
have suggested that it is a straight appropriation of the genre. (2) Others, such
as Susan Kollin and Mark A. Eaton, label All the Pretty Horses, along with McCarthy's
other Western novels, "anti-Westerns" (561 and 155 respectively). I suggest, with
Robert L. Jarrett (ix) and Tom Pilkington (318), that the novel, rather, revises
the genre and, I would add, it does so with great affection. Clearly attracted to
the mythic ideas of the West, All the Pretty Horses laments a way of life that has
become obsolete or perhaps never was. Furthermore, although the novel is to some
extent a revisionary Western, as I will clarify, the fact that it inhabits the genre
at all--and does so extremely convincingly--means that it simultaneously preserves
it.
At first glance, we can tell that All the Pretty Horses is a Western for the presence
of a recognizable Western landscape, horses, cowboys and cowboying, and a hero who
is ill-at-ease in "sivilization." (3) Also, the narrative is typically structured
around a violent confrontation between good and bad. John Grady Cole's knife fight
with the young cuchillero in the Saltillo prison is the bloodiest incident in the
novel:
John Grady watched him with a lowered gaze. When the boy reached
table he suddenly turned and sliced the tray at his
the end of the
head. John Grady saw it all
unfold slowly before him. The tray coming edgewise towards his eyes. The tin
cup slightly tilted with
the spoon in it slightly upended standing almost motionless
in the air and the boy's greasy black hair flung across his wedge-shaped
face.
(199)
Certainly, the fight hardly rates in terms of levels of violence when contrasted
with Blood Meridian or post-1960s Hollywood Westerns, such as those of Sam Peckinpah,
Sergio Leone, and Clint Eastwood. But, as is typical of many classic Westerns, like
George Stevens' Shane (1953), the central fight in All the Pretty Horses does lead
to a sort of restorative justice: John Grady avenges Jimmy Blevins' murder and returns
the stolen horses. The restoration of justice, American-style, is signalled by the
entrance into the narrative of the judge, whom John Grady meets after his return
north of the border on Thanksgiving day. The judge--the antithesis of Blood Meridian's
Judge, incidentally--allows that John Grady is "justified" in his killing of the
cuchillero (290-91).
The aching nostalgia of All the Pretty Horses is another defining feature of so
many Westerns--for example, Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) and Pat Garrett and
Billy the Kid (1973), and John Ford's later films such as The Searchers (1956) and
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In All the Pretty Horses, the all-pervasive
sense of loss is embodied in the funerals that bookend the narrative--the opening
funeral of John Grady's grandfather and the closing funeral of his Mexican abuela.
Both these figures hark back to a now-lost, yet powerfully imagined, connection
with the family ranch and the Frontier.
Early in the narrative, we read that John Grady's family has had the ranch since
1866, a time when the Frontier was being rapidly settled following the 1862 Homestead
Act and the Civil War.
In that same year [1866] the first cattle were driven through what
Bexar County and across the north end of the ranch and on
Denver.... In eighteen-eighty three, they ran
was still
to Fort Sumner and
the first barbed wire. By eighty-six
the buffalo were gone. The same winter a bad die-up. In eighty-nine Fort Concho
was disbanded.
(7)
That same year, 1889, oil was discovered in the area. Fencing of course heralded
settlement and thus the end of the short-lived open range. The Comanche, like the
buffalo, were also gone, having been put onto reservations and allotments in the
1850s. All that remains is "the faint trace" of the old Comanche road (5). Dianne
C. Luce, having noted that "vanishing" is "a word repeated over and over throughout
the trilogy," concludes that John Grady's Texas is more broadly marked by evanescence:
[It] is a vanishing world, beginning with the death of John Grady's
and ending with the death of John Grady himself [in
the title of All the Pretty Horses to
grandfather
Cities of the Plain]....From
the dedication of Cities of the Plain,
the trilogy is a lullaby singing to sleep the vanishing cowboy. (164)
This may be the case, but as duena Alfonsa remarks: "Scars have the strange power
to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten,
can they?" (135). Clearly, All the Pretty Horses is marked by evanescence, by vanishings,
but the land and its original inhabitants and stories have not been completely "scoured";
they exist yet as hauntings and scars, to imaginatively enthrall John Grady Cole.
Out on an evening ride (westwards, of course), John Grady
could hear [the Comanche], the horses and the breath of the horses
hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of
of travois poles ... and above all the
and the horses
lances and the constant drag
low chant of their traveling song which
the riders sang as they rose, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale
across
that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all
remembrance like a grail....He turned south along the old war trail
... and dismounted
... and stood like a man come to the end of something. (5)
John Grady Cole represents the end of the line of his Western ancestry, the Last
Cowboy, haunted and captivated by a past, a mythical West embodied in the family
ranch. "The country would never be the same," his father tells him. "We're like
the Comanches was two hundred years ago..." (25). On his maternal grandfather's
death, John Grady learns that his mother is set on selling the family ranch, and
her mind cannot be changed. Because of the failure of the laws of primogeniture,
he is disinherited from his ranching past, a terrible thing for a young boy who
believes "that life on the cattle ranch in west Texas is the second best thing to
dyin and goin to heaven" (17).
The nostalgia of John Grady, and indeed of the whole of the narrative, is ironically
undercut by the fact that our cowboy is a rather spectacular anachronism; he inhabits
a modernized West, in the form of a post-war Texas in the process of transition
from a predominantly agricultural- to an industry-based society and economy. (Interestingly,
this is also the era of the Golden Age of the Hollywood Western and the rise of
the television Western, reflecting, I would suggest, a more pervasive national nostalgia).
(4) In fact, as Mark Busby observes, the whole of the Border trilogy explores "the
sharp division between the frontier myth that lives inside and the diminished outside
natural world" (229). Accordingly then, as John Grady and his young friend, Lacey
Rawlins, ride the familiar Southwest landscape, they are confronted with an increasingly
overwhelming modernity:
Crossing the old Mark Fury ranch in the night when they'd
for John Grady to pull the staples
Rawlins led the horses
dismounted at the crossfences
with a catspaw and stand on the wires while
through and then raise the wires back and beat the staples
into the
on.
posts and put the catspaw back in his saddlebag and mount up to
How the hell do they expect a man to ride a horse in this
said Rawlins.
ride
country?
They dent, said John Grady. (30-31)
In a comparable lament in an essay on the demise of the Old West, "Death of the
Cowboy," McMurtry writes that
the real open range lasted almost no time. Barbed wire, the
to slice it up, was invented scarcely five years
in the minds of cattlemen and also
an Edenic fantasy of
grass
invention that was
after trail driving began. But
in movies, the open range survives still,
carefree nomadism in which cattle are allowed to follow
wherever grass grows. (18)
This persistent Edenic fantasy is embodied in All the Pretty Horses in the painting
of the horses, which hangs in the Cole home and encourages John Grady in his weltering:
There were half a dozen of them breaking through a pole corral and
were long and blowing and their eyes wild. They'd been
[N] o such horse ever was that he had seen
what kind of horses they were
the painting as if
horses
their manes
copied out of a book....
and he'd once asked his grandfather
and his grandfather looked up from his plate at
he'd never seen it before and he said those are picturebook
and went on eating. (16)
Importantly, not only is this fantasy represented as a painting, but it is a mere
copy of a picture of horses that in fact never existed. Although the space of the
West, symbolized by the horses, is so displaced--it enters the narrative as a copy
of a copy of the unreal--John Grady Cole determines to live out everything the horses
represent.
The family ranch then, from which John Grady is disinherited and which stands in
for a West that no longer exists, is the ideal mythic space for the Last Cowboy
to project his desires. McCarthy's references to the myth of the closing of the
Frontier, in his descriptions of the fences and other forms of settlement that now
scar the countryside, present the crisis of modernity in terms of loss, loss of
a specifically agrarian past. In this way, the nostalgia of All the Pretty Horses
might offer a searing critique of American late capitalism.
Once the ranch is lost to John Grady, he displaces his desire onto, first, Mexico
and then, more narrowly, the hacienda, La Purfsima. Marked on the oil company map
of Mexico that John Grady and Rawlins consult as they head out from home, "were
roads and rivers and towns on the American side of the map as far south as the Rio
Grande and beyond that all was white" (34, my emphasis). In McCarthy's novel, and
typical of Mexico Westerns such as The Wild Bunch, Mexico becomes a substitute for
the unscouted Territory of the Old West, a supposedly empty--yet nonetheless dangerous--space
upon which Manifest Destiny could make its "scouring" mark, and it is thus the antithesis
of the heavily fenced modern West. It is a mythic space outside of an American history
driven by progress, from frontier settlement to metropolitan modernity. This idealization
of Mexico is reflected in the following exchange between John Grady Cole and Rawlins,
in the home of a Mexican family with whom they spend a night soon after crossing
the Rio Grande:
What all did the old man say about work in this part of the country?
there's some big ranches yon side of the Sierra del
kilometers....
He says
Carmen. About three hundred
He made the country sound like the Big Rock Candy Mountains. (55)
John Grady Cole here makes direct reference to "Big Rock Candy Mountain," a song
about a hobos idea of paradise, made famous by Burl Ives in 1949, the year McCarthy's
narrative is set. Rawlins continues the analogy of Mexico with Paradise a few pages
later: "Where do you reckon that paradise is at?" (59). Mexico is clearly constructed
in terms of both escape from the modernity of an increasingly urbanized Texas and
the desire for a rapidly vanishing, yet ever-lingering, world.
In All the Pretty Horses, the Frontier, which ideally marks the border between civilization
and the wilderness, is transposed onto the Rio Grande. As Busby writes: "What McCarthy
adds to the older frontier formula is his use of 'la frontera,' the North/South
border between the American Southwest and Northern Mexico, as the boundary line
between warring forces" (229). Significantly, to cross the river/Frontier, Rawlins
and John Grady both strip off their clothing, a cleansing ritual similarly played
out in Tommy Lee Jones' recent film, The Three Burials of Malquiades Estrada (2005).
In both texts, the river marks the characters' entry into the purifying site of
American masculine rebirth: Mexico (45). Of this moral landscape found in Westerns
more broadly, Slotkin writes that "the American must cross the border into 'Indian
country' and experience a 'regression to a more primitive and natural condition
of life so that the false values of the 'metropolis' canbe purged and a new, purified
social contract enacted" (14). Once John Grady crosses the Rio Grande, he should
ideally move out of history/the United States, and into myth/Mexico. But, as Busby
notes: "If the American frontier hero pushes west into a historyless land, then
when that figure turns south and crosses the border, he encounters a land with a
strong and troubling past" (230). So here, south of the border, John Grady will
lose his innocence, both at the hands of the cuchillero and in his bloody desire
to kill the captain. But, although legal justice is restored on his return to the
United States, John Grady is in fact unable to enact the new social contract of
which Slotkin writes. As he leaves his abuela's funeral towards the close of the
narrative, John Grady
turned and put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and
he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if
or perhaps as if to slow the world that
for the old or the
for the
for a moment
to bless the ground there
was rushing away and seemed to care nothing
young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing
struggles, nothing for their names. Nothing for the living or the
dead. (301)
After his experience of "regression" in the wilderness, his vision of the world
and his place in it are far less assured than at the start of his westering.
"The Hacienda de Nuestra Senora de la Purfsima Concepcion [the irony is clear] was
a ranch of eleven thousand hectares situated along the edge of the Bolson Cuatro
Cienagas in the state of Coahuila" (97). Don Hector's ranch is another, if more
compressed, version of the idea of the West. (It is ironic that the further John
Grady Cole travels from the cross-fenced United States, the more constricted the
West--what stands in for it, at least--becomes). The hacienda is described in terms
of the New Garden in the New World, again drawing on the Edenic fantasy that defines
so many Western narratives.' Accordingly, the description of the young boys' first
distant sighting of the hacienda is remarkable for its dreamlike diction: "haze,"
"gauze" (93). They have never seen grass like this before (93), and "[i]n the lakes
and in the streams were species of fish not known elsewhere on earth" (97). The
sight of this seeming-paradise prompts Rawlins to ask:
This is how it was with the old waddies, aint it?
you'd like to stay here?
Yeah.
How long do you think
About a hundred years. Go to sleep. (96)
This last exchange only adds to the fairy-tale quality--think Rip Van Winkle--not
only of the ranch, but of John Grady's westering desire more broadly.
This quite fantastic description of the hacienda is reminiscent of Surprise Valley
in Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (1912):
[T]hrough the enormous round portal gleamed and glistened a beautiful valley
shining under sunset gold reflected by surrounding cliffs.... The valley was
a cove a mile long, half that wide....No
purple sage colored this valley floor.
Instead there were the white of aspens, streaks of branch and slender trunk glistening
from the
green of leaves, and the darker green of oaks, and through the
middle
of this forest, from wall to wall, ran a winding line of brilliant green which
marked the course of cottonwoods and willows.
(Ch 8)
Surprise Valley, like Don HOctor's hacienda, is "a never-never land disconnected
from history" (Slotkin 216). While Surprise Valley functions as a refuge, in All
the Pretty Horses, on the other hand, John Grady Cole's Eden--the hacienda--becomes
treacherous and violent, culminating in his slaying of the cuchillero. This is the
Infernal Paradise that Daniel Cooper Alarcon rightly argues is what defines Mexico
in All the Pretty Horses. Placing McCarthy's novel in a literary genealogy that
includes Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano,
Alarcon argues that Mexico is depicted within this tradition in Manichean terms
as the Infernal Paradise. And Mexico in All the Pretty Horses is structured according
to just such juxtaposition: "the paradise of the hacienda with the hell of the prison
at Saltillo" (Alarcon 145).
So far, then, I have examined those aspects of All the Pretty Horses that define
it as a Western--its central violence, its aching nostalgia, and its setting. (6)
More narrowly, McCarthy's novel sits comfortably within the tradition of revisionist
Westerns, typified by the films of Ford, Peckinpah, and Eastwood. The revisionist
tendency of All the Pretty Horses can explain both its odd Western historical and
physical setting. Its mid-20th-century, increasingly-urbanized landscape is crisscrossed
with fences; traversed by trucks, cars, and roads; and scarred by the presence of
the military-industrial complex. Among these symptoms and effects of modernity,
as I have noted, remain only traces, or "scourings," of the Old West and its original
inhabitants. The novel again revises the Western in the way that violence functions;
it is not "regenerative" for it does not usher in a new era of righteous progress,
but only leaves intact an ugly modernity that disorientates John Grady Cole. In
another revisionist sweep, McCarthy draws our attention to the political background
of his Mexico Western with the inclusion of details of the Mexican Revolution (235-39).
Finally, the style of the novel is not what we might expect in a genre as popular
as the Western. Much has been written on McCarthy's prose style,' but it is enough
to point out here that all McCarthy's Westerns are inflected with a gravitas achieved
not least of all through almost biblical phrase-making. The "literariness" of his
writing is also defined by passages of untranslated Spanish, along with minimal
punctuation (including a complete lack of quotation marks) and capitalization. These
stylistic features are not what we expect of a Western narrative, the genre that
owes its existence to popular culture. In a most intriguing move, McCarthy has made
it highbrow.
For the rest of this essay, I am concerned with the ways in which McCarthy actually
constructs his Western, of particular interest when we keep in mind the high literariness
with which he has injected the genre. However contradictory, McCarthy's novel depends
for its meaning upon the popular Western. All the Pretty Horses to a large extent
undermines its own prelapsarian, pastoral yearning by revealing not only its dependence
upon reconstructions of an imagined past but, more specifically, dependence upon
industrial culture. The implications of this approach for reading All the Pretty
Horses are enormous, for it lays bare the ways in which the West has been made and
is still being made in historical and other cultural narratives. That is to say,
the novel's heavy reliance on the codes of the Western is analogous to the way in
which "keywords" construct myth, which in turn becomes a substitute for history.
All the Pretty Horses uncovers the conventions of the genre by explicitly citing
classic Western styles: stock images of the Hollywood cowboy, as well as allusions
to the literary and cinematic tradition of the outlaw and to the Wild West Show.
The novel is thus self-reflexive; it self-consciously enacts the process by which
all Western narratives depend upon "icons" to become the most compelling and comprehensive
of American grand narratives.
I have said that All the Pretty Horses is self-reflexive because it self-consciously
performs the Western. This is done most obviously by inhabiting the genre itself
but also through pastiche, which, David Holloway has examined in the Border Trilogy.
Pastiche, he says, works to "resurrect the past as a series of images that stand
as substitutes for the real" (71). McCarthy's use of pastiche is nostalgic in that
All the Pretty Horses performs and thus preserves the idea of the West and the genre
itself. Pastiche is also a critical practice since it is highly aware of not only
the passing but also the inauthenticity of the Old West for which it allegedly yearns.
In other words, the fact that the West is so stylized in All the Pretty Horses only
affirms its deadness.
All the Pretty Horses, then, depends for its Western meaning on the citation of
and the more overt acting out of recycled cultural forms through pastiche. I suggest
that it is the conceit of acting that best describes this process. The narrative
invites this sort of approach with its motifs of and allusions to acting that in
fact bookend the whole of the Border Trilogy. In All the Pretty Horses, there is
an early reference to Shirley Temple. (According to the novel's time frame, she
had just starred in John Ford's Fort Apache). John Grady's mother, who is responsible
for his ranching disinheritance, just happens to be an actress, and in the epilogue
to Cities of the Plain, the last in the Trilogy, Billy Parham, now in his seventies,
has (just like Arizonacum-Hollywood cowboy Earl Shoope in Nathanael West's The Day
of the Locust [1939]), been working in El Paso as an extra in a movie, presumably
a Western (264).
In his essay, "Theater, Ritual, and Dream in the Border Trilogy," Rick Wallach also
discusses role-playing in All the Pretty Horses: "[T]he characters do not behave
merely as choreographed myths. Its protagonists and antagonists self-consciously
examine the narrative codes of the mythic dramas they perform" (160). My argument
here clearly interacts with Wallach's, certainly at the level of the trope of performance.
However, while I agree that McCarthy is well aware of the "narrative codes of the
mythic dramas" that the text performs, Wallach's broader focus is on the way in
which "[r]eferences to role-playing invoke essential questions of personal and spiritual
authenticity" (160). I argue, rather, that a reading of All the Pretty Horses through
the conceit of role-playing makes very clear its dependence on pastiche. John Grady
Cole's desire manifests itself through the appropriation of popular images of the
cowboy that come straight out of Hollywood.
While the young men very knowingly refer to themselves and each other as cowboys
(50, 58), they are also frequently described using stock cowboy images. For example,
while staying in the San Antonio YMCA, John Grady "stretched out on the bed with
his hat over his eyes" (20). Another time,
he rolled a cigarette and stood smoking it with one boot jacked
behind him....He d turned up one leg of his jeans
time to time he leaned and tipped into
his cigarette. He saw a few
they to him.
against the wall
into a small cuff and from
this receptacle the soft white ash of
men in boots and hats and he nodded gravely to them,
(21)
These stereotypical tableaux recall any number of Hollywood cowboys--Montgomery
Clift in Red River (1948), Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's mid-1960s Westerns,
John Voight in Midnight Cowboy (1969), and Brad Pitt's J. D. in Thelma and Louise
(1991).' Bearing in mind that John Grady Cole is in a big mid-20th-century city
undergoing massive postwar expansion, it seems that McCarthy affectionately mocks
John Grady's and, in fact, the whole genre's apparently built-in nostalgia for a
life that has long gone, yet still plays itself out in the popular imagination.
The only access John Grady has to an alternative world, taking the form of an impossible
Western past, is through images of the West and its resident cowboy. So, All the
Pretty Horses undermines its Edenic longing by being dependent upon industrial popular
culture and, more narrowly, empty pastiche. This is perhaps the paradox that lies
at the very heart of all Westerns.
The novel again refers us to the Hollywood Western, particularly those classic Westerns
of the 1930s-1950s that depict the lone hero riding off into the sunset, out of
history, and into a mythic landscape (for example, Shane). This Western hero is
typically uneasy in civilization, although he supports it and its defining ideas
of democracy and progress. It is clearly to this tradition that the final pages
of All the Pretty Horses appeal, when the encamped Indians watch John Grady vanish
out of time:
They stood and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing.
Solely because he would vanish....He rode
with the sun coppering his face and
the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert
birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse
passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow
of a single
being. (301-02)
There are two subgenres of Western that All the Pretty Horses specifically alludes
to: the Mexico Western, which I have already briefly discussed, and the Outlaw Western.
It is the tradition of the badman, the Bad Outlaw, that initially and playfully
attracts John Grady and Rawlins as they self-consciously transform themselves from
boys to outlaws the nearer they get to Mexico. Here, the narrative also draws on
the Mexico Western in the way that it portrays Mexico as a type of badlands, nurturing
its own bandits and revolutionaries, as well as providing refuge for American outlaws.
Dusty, unshaven, and smelling of horses, John Grady tells Rawlins that he looks
like "some kind of desperado" (36). Looking like outlaws, they start to act like
outlaws, tormenting Jimmy Blevins, for example, with their mocking discussion of
how they are going to kill him:
I aint digging no grave like we done that last one.
was your idea. I was the one said just
want to flip to see who gets to shoot
leave
him?
Hell, said John Grady, that
him for the buzzards. You
Yeah. Go ahead.
Call it,
said Rawlins....
Heads, he said.
Let me have your rifle.
said Rawlins. You shot the last three.
It aint fair,
Well go on then. You can owe me. (40-41)
This dialogue is typical of the sort of pastiche dialogue taken from Hollywood Westerns
that Holloway notices in the novel (72). Rawlins again acts out the Bad Outlaw when,
in response to a gift from John Grady of a new pair of black boots, he light-heartedly
declares, "Black boots .... Aint that the shits? I always wanted to be a badman"
(121). Clearly, he is very self-consciously fulfilling the popular cultural image
of the outlaw who always dresses in black, typified by Jack Palance's all-black
bad outlaw, Jack Wilson, in Shane.
While the boys playfully perform the roles of badmen in a badlands for the first
half of the novel, the second half of the narrative, with some gravity, structures
John Grady as the Good Outlaw. This figure first became popular in the post-Civil
War dime novel (Slotkin 295) and is perhaps more widely recognized from Hollywood
Westerns--John Wayne's Ringo Kid in Stagecoach (1939), Jesse James (1939), and of
course Kris Kristofferson's heavily revised outlaw in Pat Garrett and Billy the
Kid (1973). In keeping with the overall tone of All the Pretty Horses, the Good
Outlaw is a nostalgic figure, a pastoral ideal that resists modernization, according
to Kent L. Steckmesser:
[W]e have a basically decent man who becomes the victim of one or another kind
of persecution. After insufferable provocation, he
makes revenge his raison d'etre. His
evil politicians
turns on the persecutors and
enemies, who are corrupt officials and sheriffs,
or land-grabbers, ordinarily have the law on their side....
Implicit in such a plot is the assumption that legal law can be and
is divorced from moral law. In such situations, the outlaw
often
may be seen as a hero,
since he defies corrupt authority in defence of the "higher" cause of social
justice. (Steckmesser 1)
Within the Good Outlaw framework that Steckmesser sets out here, John Grady comes
to represent all that is good about the American (masculine) character forged from
the strenuous life. He acts according to the dictates of his good and true heart,
even if this should cross with the law, in response to "insufferable provocation":
young Jimmy Blevins being executed on orders from the Mexican captain (himself a
recognizable type, the bandido, from Mexico Westerns); the boys' horses are stolen;
and John Grady is falsely imprisoned. It is when he is finally released that he
truly outlaws himself, in order that he might avenge these crimes, saying: "[N]ow
I have no place to live" (243). And it is at this moment, when he must restore justice
by taking righteous revenge on the captain, that the narrative clearly draws on
the icon of the six-cylinder gunfighter:
He dismounted and unrolled his plunder and opened the box of shells
of them in his pocket and checked the pistol that it
and closed the cylinder gate and put
and put half
was loaded all six cylinders
the pistol into his belt and rolled his
gear back up and retied the roll behind the saddle and mounted the horse again
and rode into
the town. (257)
This image brings to mind all number of similarly righteous but reluctant gunfighters
from Hollywood Westerns, such as Will Kane in High Noon (1952) and Shane (1953).
John Grady takes the captain hostage and eventually abandons him in a hostile Mexican
landscape. As is typical of the Good Outlaw plot, John Grady Cole is exonerated
on his return to the United States. He gains the high moral ground in face of corrupt
representatives of the law, who are, significantly, Mexican. John Grady, who in
the course of the narrative has become the authentic Good Outlaw, must act on his
own and ultimately superior sense of true justice, and, as I have noted, the judge
affirms him in this.
So, in the ways that I have here outlined, All the Pretty Horses structures the
young boys according to certain types from the Hollywood Western, and thus enacts
a kind of ironic double-coding. As McCarthy writes within a particular genre whose
signifying capital is vast, as far as the stakes in a national myth-making go, his
novel at the same time underscores those moments of its very construction by referring
us to the popular culture from which these myths have been expanded upon and disseminated.
In this way, in the performance of the West that the novel embraces, acting and
an authentic West become blurred.
There is a final form of the popular cultural Western that All the Pretty Horses
refers us to, the spectacular tradition of the Wild West show. Buffalo Bill Cody's
Wild West Show lasted more than an incredible thirty years, from 1883 to 1916, and
was "a major influence on American ideas about the Frontier past at the turn of
the century" (Slotkin 66). It is worth noting that the show began in 1883, when
the era of the open range was over, and only several years before the superintendent
of the census declared the official closing of the Frontier. What this suggests
is that as Western history stopped, so to speak, myth-making and performance took
its place--no better example being the life of Cody himself. Before his Wild West
days, Cody had an authentic Frontier identity as "farmer, teamster, drover, trapper,
Civil War soldier in a Jayhawk regiment, Pony Express rider, stagecoach driver,
posse-man, meat hunter for the Kansas Pacific Railroad, and army scout" (Slotkin
69). However, just as with outlaw Jesse James, it was only Cody's later appearance
in dime novels and his Wild West Show, rather than his real-life experiences, that
became conflated with authentic Western history. In a similar way, it is the recycled
performances of the past that constitute McCarthy's West.
The novel's portrayal of the superb horse-breaking skills of John Grady Cole (he
is a horse-whisperer of sorts) directly alludes to Cody's Wild West Show, which
included what was known as "cowboy fun," that is, trick riding and roping (Slotkin
68). These are the spectacular skills John Grady displays to his captive audience
on the hacienda when he challenges himself to break in the sixteen green horses
in just four days. And it is a spectacle, or what Rawlins calls a "circus":
[T]here were some twenty people standing about looking at the horses--women,
children, young girls and men--all waiting for [John
Grady and Rawlins] to return.
Where the hell did they come from? said Rawlins.
I don't know.
Word gets around when the circus comes to town, dont it?...
ridden eleven of the sixteen horses .... Someone had
... and there were something like a
hundred
from the pueblo of La Vega six miles to
By dark he'd
built a fire on the ground
people gathered, some come
the south, some from farther. (105-07)
(9)
While this description merely alludes to the type of "cowboy fun" performed in Cody's
show, there are more overt references to the Wild West elsewhere in the novel. For
example, as Blevins prepares to shoot Rawlins' billfold as it is tossed high into
the air, Rawlins asks: "You ready, Annie Oakley?" (48). Annie Oakley, of course,
appeared in Bill Cody's Wild West, and it was her sharp-shooting skills that made
her not only synonymous with marksmanship but also with performance. A little later
in the narrative, Rawlins and Blevins argue over whether or not John Grady Cole
is as great a horseman as the famous Booger Red (58). Booger Red, whose real name
was Samuel Thomas Privett, was a Texan bronc-buster who had his own wild west show
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Once more, these allusions to popular
cultural images present the West and its cowboy inhabitants as "mere" actors of
Western representations. McCarthy's novel does not rely on authentic Western history
and experience for its Western setting and associated meanings but on their representations
in popular culture. For this reason, the text forces us to reconsider the authenticity
of the West in historical and other cultural narratives.
In sum, then, I have sought to qualify the seemingly all-too-easy description of
All the Pretty Horses as a Western and argued that its relationship to the genre
is both affectionate and revisionary. I then focused on the conceit of acting to
draw out the way in which McCarthy has made his West: through the pastiche of popular
cultural Westerns. And this is where the irony lies at the heart of All the Pretty
Horses. While McCarthy's novel alludes to a past, one that has extraordinary mythological
and ideological purchase in terms of conceptions of American nationhood and democracy,
it is a past that cannot be repeated except through its performance as pastiche.
The narrative, in its recycling of past forms, is extremely alert to the way myth
takes the place of history. In the end, then, it seems that All the Pretty Horses
is to a large extent about the myth-making process itself. However, as I have suggested
throughout, McCarthy's novel does not reject the myth of the West and its concomitant
ideals to leave nothing in its place; it is far too attracted to them. Rather, it
lays bare the "keywords" and "icons" that lie at the heart of perhaps the most gripping
of American narratives.
Near the beginning of All the Pretty Horses, before he "lights out," John Grady
Cole watches his mother perform in a play in San Antonio: "He'd the notion that
there would be something in the story itself to tell him about the way the world
was or was becoming, but there was not. There was nothing in it at all" (21). As
his attempt to find significance in the play is frustrated, so too is his westering
necessarily thwarted, rooted as it is in similarly empty meanings and impossible
desires. The past cannot be regained in any authentic way; it can only be represented,
through its re-enactment as the pastiche of its dominant images. In the end, "there
is nothing in it at all." So McCarthy leaves John Grady Cole at the close of the
novel, riding ever westwards, "into the darkening land, the world to come" (302)
in this thoroughly modern Texas.
WORKS CITED
Brewton, Vince. "The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy's Early Novels
and the Border Trilogy." The Southern Literary Journal 37 (2004): 121-43.
Brinkmeyer, Robert H. Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers
and the West. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2002.
Busby, Mark. "Into the Darkening Land, the World to Come: Cormac McCarthy's Border
Crossings." Myth, Legend and Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Rick
Wallach. New York: Manchester UP, 2000. 227-48.
Eaton, Mark. "Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy's Border Fiction." Modern
Fiction Studies 49.1 (2003): 155-80.
Grey, Zane. Riders of the Purple Sage. 2002. 12 May 2006 <http:/ /www.litrix.com/
purpsage / purps001.htm>.
Guillemin, George. "'As of some site where life had not succeeded': Sorrow, Allegory,
and Pastoralism in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy." A Cormac McCarthy Companion:
The Border Trilogy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson: UP of Mississippi,
2002. 92-130.
Holloway, David. The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy. Westport and London:
Greenwood
P, 2002.
Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. New York: Twayne, 1997.
Johnson, Michael L. New Westers: The West in Contemporary American Culture. Lawrence:
UP of Kansas, 1996.
Kollin, Susan. "Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the
Contemporary
Western." Contemporary Literature 42: 3 (Fall 2001): 557-88.
Kreml, Nancy. "Stylistic Variation and Cognitive Constraint in All the Pretty Horses."
Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Wade Hall and Rick
Wallach. El Paso: Texas Western P, 1995.137-48.
Luce, Dianne C. "The Vanishing World of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy." A Cormac
McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2001.161-97.
McCarthy Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. London: Picador, 1993.
--. Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West. London: Picador, 1985.
--. The Crossing. London: Picador, 1994.
McMurtry, Larry "Death of the Cowboy." The New York Review of Books 46.17 (1999):17-18.
Messent, Peter. "All the Pretty Horses: Cormac McCarthy's Mexican Western." Borderlines:
Studies in American Culture 2.2 (1994): 92-112.
Morrison, Gail Moore. "All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole's Expulsion from Paradise."
Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Jackson:
UP of Mississippi, 1999. 175-94.
Pilkington, Tom. "Fate and Free Will on the American Frontier: Cormac McCarthy's
Western Fiction." Western American Literature 27.4 (1993): 311-22.
Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century
America. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998.
Steckmesser, Kent L. "Lawmen and Outlaws." Literary History of the American West.
Texas
Christian
UP,
1998.
depts/prs/amwest/html/w10119.htm1
16
May
2006
<
http:/
/www2/tcu.edu/
>.
West, Nathanael. The Day of the Locust. London: Penguin, 2000.
Woodward, Richard B. Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction." New York Times on the
Web 19 Apr. 1992. 31 May 2006 < http:/ /www.nytimes.com/ books/ 98/05/17/specials/
mccarthy-venom.html? r=1&oref=slogin >.
Worster, Donald. Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West. New
York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992.
NOTES
(1) Peter Messent also appreciates the contradiction at the heart of the novel,
in "All the Pretty Horses: Cormac McCarthy 's Mexican Western," Borderlines: Studies
in American Culture 2.2 (1994): 92-112.
(2) Vince Brewton, for example, argues that "McCarthy uses the Western to explore
the most permanent concerns of literature .... Each of the novels of the Border
Trilogy relies on a version of the traditional Westerns conflict between right and
wrong," in "The Changing Landscape of Violence in Cormac McCarthy's Early Novels
and the Border Trilogy," The Southern Literary journal 37.1 (2004): 134.
(3) Tom Pilkington observes that the novel's plot is "a variation on a story that
has been told often in western literature. A wandering cowboy and his sidekick ride
innocently into hostile territory. There ensue fights against insur mountable odds,
the hero's romance with a lovely young sehorita, chases on horseback through a harsh
but beautiful landscape," "Fate and Free Will on the American Frontier: Cormac McCarthy's
Western Fiction," Western American Literature 27.4 (1993): 318-19.
(4) Richard Slotkin accounts for this Golden Age:
In the midst of this ideological turmoil, the Western and its
offered a language and set of conceptual
informing mythology
structure [sic] rich in devices for
defining the differences
and
between competing races, classes, cultures, social orders,
moral codes. It incorporated these definitions in pseudo-historical
which suggested that human heroism could shape the
narratives
course of future events. Moreover,
the preoccupation with violence that characterizes the Western and the Myth of
the Frontier made its formulations particularly useful during a period of continual
conflict between the claims of democratic procedure and Cold War
policies
that required the use of armed force.
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman:
U of Oklahoma P, 1998) 350.
(5) The allusion to the Genesis myth is explicit: Alejandra/Eve, John Grady/ Adam,
sex/ sin. See Gail Moore Morrison, "All the Pretty Horses: John Grady Cole's Expulsion
from Paradise," Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne
C. Luce (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999) 175-94.
(6) Mark Busby argues that the novel also draws on other features of the literary
Western: the captivity narrative and "the youthful Adam who becomes a messianic
figure following an initiation," "Into the Darkening Land, the World to Come: Cormac
McCarthy's Border Crossings," Myth, Legend and Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac
McCarthy, ed. Rick Wallach (New York: Manchester UP, 2000) 233.
(7) See, for example, Robert L. Jarrett, "The Rhetoric of McCarthy's Fiction: Style,
Visionary Landscapes and Parables," Cormac McCarthy (New York: Twayne, 1997) 121-53;
and Nancy Kreml, "Stylistic Variation and Cognitive Constraint in All the Pretty
Horses," Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac McCarthy, ed. Wade Hall
and Rick Wallach (El Paso: Texas Western P, 1995) 137-48.
(8) In a nice twist, Midnight Cowboy's Joe Buck dons a pastiched cowboy identity
in order to flee the West and make it big out East.
(9) In McCarthy's The Crossing (London: Picador, 1994), the second novel in the
Border Trilogy, a similar scene is played out with Billy and the wolf (99-101),
which is earlier described as a circus animal (76).
Gleeson-White, Sarah
VO 33
XX Full Text
ZZ