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 myriad, but [Michael

L.] Johnson [in New Westers] is probably right in suggesting that the recent

imaginative lightin out to the Western frontier is in large part a response to

what is perceived 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 poetic construction of tremendous economy

and compression and a mnemonic device capable of evoking a complex system of

historical 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 the end of the

table he suddenly turned and sliced the tray at his 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 was still

Bexar County and across the north end of the ranch and on to Fort Sumner and

Denver.... In eighteen-eighty three, they ran 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 grandfather

and ending with the death of John Grady himself [in Cities of the Plain]....From

the title of All the Pretty Horses to 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 and the horses

hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag

of travois poles ... and above all the 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 dismounted at the crossfences

for John Grady to pull the staples with a catspaw and stand on the wires while

Rawlins led the horses through and then raise the wires back and beat the staples

into the posts and put the catspaw back in his saddlebag and mount up to ride

on. How the hell do they expect a man to ride a horse in this country?

said Rawlins. 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 invention that was

to slice it up, was invented scarcely five years after trail driving began. But

in the minds of cattlemen and also in movies, the open range survives still,

an Edenic fantasy of carefree nomadism in which cattle are allowed to follow

grass 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 their manes

were long and blowing and their eyes wild. They'd been copied out of a book....

[N] o such horse ever was that he had seen and he'd once asked his grandfather

what kind of horses they were and his grandfather looked up from his plate at

the painting as if he'd never seen it before and he said those are picturebook

horses 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? He says

there's some big ranches yon side of the Sierra del Carmen. About three hundred

kilometers.... 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 for a moment

he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there

or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing

for the old or the young or rich or poor or dark or pale or he or she. Nothing

for the 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? Yeah. How long do you think

you'd like to stay here? 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 against the wall

behind him....He d turned up one leg of his jeans into a small cuff and from

time to time he leaned and tipped into this receptacle the soft white ash of

his cigarette. He saw a few men in boots and hats and he nodded gravely to them,

they to him. (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. Hell, said John Grady, that

was your idea. I was the one said just leave him for the buzzards. You

want to flip to see who gets to shoot him? Yeah. Go ahead. Call it,

said Rawlins.... Heads, he said. Let me have your rifle. It aint fair,

said Rawlins. You shot the last three. 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 turns on the persecutors and

makes revenge his raison d'etre. His enemies, who are corrupt officials and sheriffs,

evil politicians or land-grabbers, ordinarily have the law on their side....

Implicit in such a plot is the assumption that legal law can be and often

is divorced from moral law. In such situations, the outlaw 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 and put half

of them in his pocket and checked the pistol that it was loaded all six cylinders

and closed the cylinder gate and put 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?... By dark he'd

ridden eleven of the sixteen horses .... Someone had built a fire on the ground

... and there were something like a hundred people gathered, some come

from the pueblo of La Vega six miles to 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

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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 informing mythology

offered a language and set of conceptual structure [sic] rich in devices for

defining the differences between competing races, classes, cultures, social orders,

and moral codes. It incorporated these definitions in pseudo-historical narratives

which suggested that human heroism could shape the 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

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