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Trauma and Mythologies of the Old West in the Western Novels Of Trauma and Mythologies of the Old West in the Western Novels of Cormac McCarthy A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2012 Antony Harrison School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Contents Abstract ........................................................................................ 3 Declaration/Copyright ..................................................................4 Acknowledgements ......................................................................5 Introduction ..................................................................................6 Chapter One: Trauma, Myth and the Quest Narrative in The Crossing..............63 Chapter Two: Trauma and Heroic Masculinity in All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain................................111 Chapter Three: Trauma: Past, Present, Future and National Identity in No Country for Old Men and The Road........................................181 Conclusion.....................................................................................253 Bibliography..................................................................................262 Word Count: 83,426 2 Abstract This thesis explores how McCarthy uses figures of trauma to interrogate the creation of myth in three categories: mythic narrative, mythic masculinity, and mythic national identity. Focusing on McCarthy‟s five most recent novels, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men and The Road, I argue that this interdependency of myth and trauma helps explain the repetitive cycles of loss, failure and defeat that pervade his work. Most critics of McCarthy have failed to explain adequately the relationship between these cycles of failure and the various mythologies of the West in these novels, sometimes even praising his supposed rejuvenation of the „exhausted‟ myths of cowboys and the Western frontier. But recent developments in trauma theory help explain how McCarthy uses figures of loss and trauma to re-imagine the very structure of myth in twenty-first century America, particularly in relation to mythic models of the heroic quest, heroic masculinity, and American Exceptionalism. Furthermore, this reading of McCarthy also extends trauma theory by enabling a reconsideration of both myth and trauma in terms of futurity. McCarthy‟s fusing of trauma with myth exposes how myths are typically a cyclically violent and destructive cultural phenomenon, as well as revealing how myths always depend upon the projection of a future event that ultimately collapses into failure. By explaining these connections between trauma, failure, myth, and futurity, I thus revitalize the criticism devoted to McCarthy‟s writing and open up new ways to think about the larger concerns of narrative, genre, gender, and nation. I investigate how and why McCarthy takes the mythologies of the Old West, and rather than revising or subverting these myths, strives for a further model of myth in the form of heroic narratives that always end in failure and unresolved traumatic experience. And yet, McCarthy does not simply offer the failure or collapse of myth itself. Rather, his engagement with trauma in these Western novels reinstates the mythic as a cyclical pattern in which the present experience of trauma invokes some kind of loss in the past, sometimes even an unspecified loss, and projects some kind of further loss into the future, so as to keep the very notion of myth in constant play or motion. The model of myth that McCarthy offers is thus an eternal cycle that can never resolve itself as redemption. In the process I will examine how McCarthy‟s traumatic model of myth helps us understand how a failing and defeated cowboy culture, with its heritage based on mythic visions of mastery and loss may, in striving for a sustained mythic experience, remain trapped in unresolved traumatic cycles and patterns of violence, crisis and suffering which nevertheless produce a further cycle of traumatic myth. I engage McCarthy‟s negotiations of the mythic quest in my analysis of The Crossing in Chapter One, in which I show how the traumatic failure of the quest infuses that quest with mythic symbolism, and spurs the inevitable repetition of the quest in order to preserve that mythic cycle. In Chapter Two I examine the relationship between myth, trauma, and masculinity in All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain where I argue heroic masculinity relies upon the attempt to master the defeat and failure associated with trauma. In Chapter Three I examine how, in No Country for Old Men and The Road, the myth of American nation is associated with perpetual affirmations of chosenness and survival and how McCarthy‟s novels open up new ways to understand how American culture builds a mythic past out of a sense of traumatic loss and projects that mythic vision onto an illusory and destructive future. 3 DECLARATION No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning; COPYRIGHT STATEMENT i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/policies/intellectualproperty. pdf), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in The University’s policy on presentation of Theses 4 Acknowledgements: Thanks to Kaye Mitchell and Peter Knight for their advice and feedback. Thanks to Dee Fleming for her support and wise counsel. And a special thanks to Michael Bibler for his invaluable scholarly guidance and support throughout the writing of this thesis. And finally thanks to my wife Lorraine for your financial, emotional and moral support throughout these four years. I could never have completed this without your hard work, love and friendship. 5 Introduction Cormac McCarthy‟s Western novels seem to tell the same story over and over again. It is a story that begins with absence and loss, continues with a quest, a journey or a challenge to retrieve or redeem that loss, yet always ends in failure or further loss. My readings of McCarthy‟s recent novels All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), Cities of the Plain (1998), No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006) explain why McCarthy tells this story not once but many times, and why the repetition of failure is crucial for understanding McCarthy‟s particular engagement with mythologies of the Old West in his Western fiction. I argue that in this repetition of failure running through the Western novels McCarthy explores the sense of the persistent irresolvable loss of the Old West at the heart of American culture. And I show how these novels‟ preoccupation with patterns of repetition and re-enactment of loss must be understood not only in terms of Old West mythologies, but also as mythologies that are imagined and experienced, both in the novels and in American culture, as a form of trauma. McCarthy evokes this sense of loss at the beginning of All the Pretty Horses in the last words John Grady Cole‟s father says to his son: The last thing his father said was that the country would never be the same. People don‟t feel safe no more, he said. We‟re like the Comanche was two hundred years ago. We don‟t know what‟s goin to show up here come daylight. We don‟t even know what color they‟ll be.1 Again at the end of the novel, John Grady having ended his quest into Mexico echoes this loss. In response to his friend, Lacey Rawlins‟ question, „Where is your country?‟ he replies, 1 Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses (London: Picador, 1993), 25-26. 6 „I don‟t know [...] I don‟t know where it is. I don‟t know what happens to country.‟2 Both John Grady and his father here mourn the loss of „country‟ as both a physical and a figurative space that cannot be restored. This mourning for „country‟ underpins McCarthy‟s need to retell repeatedly the same tale of unresolved loss. I argue that the sense of absence or loss of „country‟ that permeates these novels is a continuing cultural wound that his characters transmit from generation to generation by repeatedly attempting and failing to heal that wound through various quests. McCarthy‟s Western novels revolve endlessly around this cultural wound, this absence which has displaced the „true country‟ where heroic narrative and masculinity once supposedly flourished and could find fulfilment again, if only that country could be rediscovered. The absence or loss that haunts these novels from the outset can best be understood, I argue, as a form of persistent cultural trauma.
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