Cormac Mccarthy's All the Pretty Horses and The
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“A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS”: CORMAC MCCARTHY’S ALL THE PRETTY HORSES AND THE AESTHETICS OF ADVENTURE ALEXANDRU BUDAC University of Timișoara Abstract: A typical American coming-of-age novel, “All the Pretty Horses” (1993) is Cormac McCarthy’s masterful way of dealing with universal topics such as boyhood, parents and children, violent passions, and friendship. Yet the mythical tonalities and crafted structure hide an intricate philosophical web, which brings adventure fiction codes and environmental issues together. My paper aims to highlight the relation between character and nature and to question the realism of the novel. I will also try to explain why Cormac McCarthy’s narrative style encourages allegorical readings, while subverting them at the same time. Key words: adventure literature, Cormac McCarthy, environment, mimesis, violence 1. Introduction. A genre which never gets old The adventure literature has always been very popular, yet the genre is often overshadowed by misconceptions. Definitely, adventure fiction has charms, but lacks prestige. It is labeled as “children literature” at best and sent off to the “escape literature” shelf at worst. However, this ancient genre with pretty conservative aesthetic principles – we might say they are as old as the first human urge to tell a story – has enchanted writers and readers alike and has proved prone to enduring all sorts of cultural fashions. If we think of the literary adventurous past, the first name that comes to mind is that of Robert Louis Stevenson. In the English-speaking world at least, the Scottish writer is not only an adventure fiction virtuoso, but also its best theorist. In the late nineteenth century, he was the one who rekindled the genre dimming luster. His novels and stories are not just the imaginative quest of a genius forced by his poor health to travel incessantly towards exotic lands. They are an aesthetic manifesto too. Stevenson reacted against the “domestic novel’s” growing success and against the pretenses of authors such as Émile Zola, according to whom prose writings should be accurately scientific and socially involved. As he “passionately believed that the greater part of life was chance”, the Scottish author defended romance (Kiely 2005:26-29). In his letters and in his polemical essays, he claimed that adventure and human nature are both uncontrollable and that art should capture “the importance of event” (Kiely 2005:30). Stevenson wished to keep intact a certain “sacred purity” of adventure and did this by writing fictions in which the events had a flowing quality, because continuous movement links literature and life (Kiely 2005:30, 34, 40). As R.L. Abrahamson (2006:21) puts it, “being a good reader is like being a hero in Stevenson’s fiction.” An enthusiastic admirer of Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, Stevenson shares with Mark Twain, another great writer of adventure literature, the belief that the hero, preferably a child or a teenager, must leave the domestic space in order to gain freedom (Fletcher 2009:42-43). More than a century later, Cormac McCarthy teaches us the same lesson. He is the heir of Faulkner and Melville, rather than the heir of Stevenson and Twain. Yet he shapes the aesthetics of adventure with similar zest. B.A.S. vol. XX, 2014 8 McCarthy’s heroes could be described as outcasts on the run. When they stop, troubles occur. Before dying, the nameless kid dismounts and meets judge Holden in a tavern at the end of Blood Meridian (1985), Llewelyn Moss rushes to his death soon after he gives a ride to a hitchhiker girl in No Country for Old Men (2005), but nowhere do we understand better the perils of slowing the journey down than in the Border Trilogy. The wind blowing through the prairie, the barking of coyotes, the rapping of hail, the hawks prowling in the sky, the blinding zigzags of thunderstorms, the red eyes of horses in the deep night reflecting both camp and celestial fires are the very signs from which we can decipher the characters’ intentions. Keeping introspection in shadow, McCarthy accustomed us to the complex links between human action and environment. Trying to pin down his protagonists by enlisting them as literary archetypes seems like trying to explain natural phenomena by separating them from each other. Only when we apprehend changes holistically may we hope to understand the phenomena better. I will try to argue that, by rendering human movement and environment artistically in the first novel of the Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy reshapes adventure literature in a personal manner. By mastering a conglomerate of historical facts, charismatic figures, boyhood ethos, and philosophical puzzles, he blends the realistic novel and American mythology. 2. John Grady Cole. The portrait of a stoic cowboy In 1949, sixteen year old John Grady Cole flees home in San Angelo together with his best friend, Lacey Rawlins, and crosses the Mexican border. On their way, they make the acquaintance of Jimmy Blevins, a mysterious kid riding a big bay horse, who has followed them from a distance. He is a remarkable shooter, yet a tenacious troublemaker. Blevins’ company turns ill-fated rapidly when he loses his horse during a thunderstorm. After an attempt to recover the lost animal from a Mexican village, John Grady and Rawlins part with the boy for safety reasons. Soon, the young Americans arrive at Hacienda de Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Conceptión, where they find jobs as horse breakers and become very appreciated for their talents. Here, John Grady falls in love with Alejandra, the beautiful daughter of the hacendado don Héctor Rocha y Villareal, thus stirring the family’s anger – a family whose generation history is the history of Mexico itself. John Grady and Alejandra are separated by force, and along with Lacey, the horse whisperer will be thrown in jail on accusations of theft and murder complicity with Jimmy Blevins. The Mexican Odyssey turns into a nightmare when the reckless kid is killed by local authorities and the two boys have to face prison dangers in typical McCarthy violent encounters. Despite western scenery, cowboy gunfights and Shakespearian love story, All the Pretty Horses (1993) belongs to a genre of its own. Jay Ellis (2006) states that the “cowboy books” of the Border Trilogy bring forth the issue of life refinement through domestic comfort versus dangerous living according to the laws of nature in order to preserve one’s authenticity. In McCarthy’s earlier Southern novels, this issue simply existed as “stoicism without hats and boots” (Ellis 2006:201). John Grady’s exceptional ability to tame mustangs seems to endow him with a deep understanding of the world. And he is a stoic indeed, although he prefers acting to philosophizing. The boy leaves home soon after his grandfather’s death and after failing to persuade his mother to keep the old farm. Yet, he was already on the move before that. In the beginning, we see 9 (UN)REALITY INTENSIFIED him wandering the Comanche land on which the farm is built, like a warrior from the past. The novel ends symmetrically, when John Grady greets Indians near a pumpjacks field. Thus, McCarthy places him in a long chain of expert riders and introduces the teenager to us as a “dispossessed Comanche” (Morrison 1999:176). His wandering began long before any border had split the county and would continue probably long after the borders vanish. John Grady’s passion for horses is not that of an ordinary cowboy, but that of a young man capable of apprehending his heartbeats in perfect synchrony with the heartbeats of horses running “in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised” (McCarthy 1993:162). The Nermernuh hunters from the north of Santa Fe were famous for their incursions into neighboring territories. We know these tribes by the name of “Comanche,” which was given to them by their enemies and which means “people who fight us all the time” (Mann 2011:123). Definitely, John Grady is a natural-born fighter and, at sixteen, one does not need a special reason to abandon school and flee home. The border is interesting only as long as it remains an obstacle. Where would the thrill of adventure be if there were no trespassing? Time does not concern the two boys. They have plenty. Their escapade begins like an illustrated epic: They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing. (McCarthy 1993:30) Unlike Lacey Rawlins, a typical bragging teenager eager to prove his will and his tough character, John Grady leaves on a quest. He is only partially revealed to us and his true intentions remain an enigma, at least until the Cities of the Plain (1998), the last book of the trilogy. But even there his personality remains cloudy. Although he behaves like any other boy of his age – especially when it comes to dealing with erotic issues – his features seem to have been forged in a mythical past. He does not learn too much from experience, as he trains himself in the development of both physical and ethical reflexes. John Grady whispers his will to horses and successfully passes all loyalty tests as friend and lover.