Cormac McCarthy, "Cities of the Plain"

(Vintage, 1999)

"Every man's death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honour the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?"

The final installment of McCarthy's Border Trilogy unites John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, the protagonists of the first and second novels respectively. It takes place three years after the narrative of "All the Pretty Horses"; it is the early 1950s and John Grady is now twenty and Billy twenty-eight. The two work on a ranch near the US-Mexico border, situated on land which is soon to be bought up by the American military. Billy and John Grady share a friendship akin to brotherhood, for among other reasons John Grady in many respects reminds Billy of his long-dead younger brother Boyd.

On a short visit to a brothel across the border with Billy, John Grady is struck by the beauty of one of the brothel workers, who young and epileptic. He falls in love with her; the problem is that her pimp has fallen in love with her too. John Grady vows to marry her and live with her just off the ranch, but in order for this to happen she must somehow escape her situation. This precipitates a nailbiting climax that is arguably ultra-violent even by McCarthy's standards.

While "Cities of the Plain" does not exactly tie the preceding novels together, it does expound upon their themes and offers something by way of a repetition that is worth pondering. John Grady's tenacity and Billy's decisive, elder-brotherly comportment shine through, but in a rapidly shifting context. The wilds of the previous novels are giving way to the prerogatives of commerce and the military-industrial complex. The actions and ethical codes of the protagonists, quixotic at best in a land where gas stations and highway developments stand in for windmills, figure as positively alien or anachronistic in places; in fact the bulk of the narrative seems something of a dream in light of the novel's epilogue, which takes place fifty years later at the turn of the 21st century (to be sure, yet another improbably philosophical stranger shows up to enlighten the protagonist at this point, discoursing at length about dreams and dreamers). Perhaps the trilogy taken as a whole is best read as a kind of requiem for a certain time and place and way of life which have long since given way to the visions of other dreamers. Or perhaps the point, more accurately, is that capitalism and American empire are, properly speaking, a dream dreamt by no one in particular, though for all that making demands upon and shaping an environment and a people with brutal violence.

As is standard for McCarthy, there is however a tiny and simple glimmer of light in this novel. Billy Parham's travels reveal, perhaps, that even in a situation of violent environmental and cultural upheaval, there is a goodness waiting in the interstices of wandering lost.

Cormac McCarthy, "The Crossing"

(Vintage, 1995)

The second volume of McCarthy's Border Trilogy concerns a different set of characters and takes place around ten years before the action of the more highly regarded "All the Pretty Horses". If I'm not mistaken, what I characterized as the negative romance of the latter is all but gone from "The Crossing". Overall the second novel is far bleaker and more meditative/philosophical (at its worst, plodding and overly long). Though to be sure there are some pulse-pounding sequences in the best tradition of the Western genre.

The "crossing" in question is ostensibly that of the main character, teenager and vaquero Billy Parham, across the New Mexico / Mexico border. He sets out, without telling his family, to return a she-wolf he has caught near his father's farm to what is most likely her original habitat in a Mexican mountain range. He must also make subsequent crossings and re-crossings in the wake of the events this decision sets in motion. True to McCarthy's style and substance, Billy and later his younger brother Boyd wander a desolate, violent and improbable Mexico torn between cultures as well as between past and future. Along the way various people they meet give philosophical substance and stylistic embellishment to what is otherwise a taut, Spartan tale of young men out for justice and troubleshooting the various pitfalls of living on the road in an inhospitable land.

I would suggest however that the true notion of "crossing" at play in this novel pertains to the nigh-infinite distance between the particular beings who inhabit McCarthy's chaotic, violent world. Much is made in the sequence with the she-wolf of the imponderable difference separating her from her captor Billy - just as in "All the Pretty Horses", John Grady and other vaqueros frequently muse on the distance separating man from horse. The sequence with the wolf comprises only the novel's first section, however. What is most interesting is how McCarthy spins the allegory of the wolf into a world where human beings are separated from each other by a veritable chasm, between which words and gestures make paltry communion. That is perhaps the point: for all the distance between beings, there is a type of communion, fleeting and unsure, that may be struck. The crossing is tenuous and terrifying and without guarantee, but it may be risked nonetheless; witness Billy standing in the dog-fighting pit with the wolf, or Boyd in his silent understanding with the young Mexican girl who joins them on their journey.

All of this puts me in mind of the later Lyotard, about whom I'm writing a doctoral thesis. In his later writings, Lyotard pondered the possibility of passage between what appear to be incommensurable faculties, genres of discourse, etc. His writings on Malraux in particular stress the notion of communion, love and solidarity between wholly alien beings (i.e. between human beings, who are essentially wholly alien to each other). "The Crossing" is, among other things, a singular study of these seemingly impossible yet altogether possible passages.

Cormac McCarthy, "All the Pretty Horses"

(Vintage, 1993)

There's a metaphysic, an entire universe at the bottom of McCarthy's fiction; the hard part for me has been to dig it up, and the following is simply a musing on that topic.

McCarthy seems, for the most part, to deliver a chaotic, almost high-modernist metaphysic of chance and naked force (see in particular No Country for Old Men or Blood Meridian). But the more I read him, the more I'm convinced that this can't be the whole picture. All the Pretty Horses, the first book in his acclaimed Border Trilogy, is rife with symbols and discursions betokening the aforementioned universe of constant, chaotic change. Something else emerges however: as long as I'm bandying about "isms", I might call it a negative Romanticism or something close to that.

The book is a Western set in the early 1950s near the Texas-Mexico border. The main protagonist finds himself homeless at the age of sixteen, and enlists a friend to travel with him by horseback to Mexico in search of work and adventure. A third youngster, a stranger, joins them on the road, and this eventually sets off a series of violent events which escape the protagonists' control. In the meantime, however, they find work with a rich landowner/rancher. The main protagonist falls in love with the rancher's daughter, becomes her lover, and attempts to overcome the massive obstacles put in their way.

For me, the following passage sums up the entire novel: "He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower".

Nature is not an infinitely creative source of abundance as in Romanticism, but rather an insatiably vampiric entity dragging down beauty, or allowing it to appear only briefly, and at an exhorbitant cost. One thinks here of the bleakness of The Road, but on further reflection the fragility of beauty and goodness in an otherwise indifferent or malevolent world is a constant theme throughout McCarthy's fiction. Humanity itself is ephemeral; it is in any case bought at what may seem too high a price, as the main protagonists of both The Road and All the Pretty Horses learn firsthand. In general the Western is, perhaps, one of the best genres through which to lay all this bare. Of McCarthy's Westerns, however, I would suggest that the interested reader start with All the Pretty Horses lest the novelization of this metaphysic offered by what is arguably his best work, Blood Meridian, prove altogether too terrifying or unpalatable.