Border Trilogy Research Articles

Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy ed. by Rick Wallach

5 0 4 WAL 3 7 . 4 WINTER 2 0 0 3 Toms and his brother Georges problem was that they never really became “solid” citizens of anywhere. Tom had been in and out of the Wallowa area in the mid-1880s, buying and selling property, and the Skovlins found that he had “dabbled in stolen horses along with Hank Vaughan crossing this area between the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Nez Perce Indian Reservation in Idaho” (276). That the McCartys were hardly ever captured for their misdeeds only makes them more noteworthy. Tom’s association with and influence on outlaws like Butch Cassidy and Matt Warner is noted, for the McCartys were outlaws to be reckoned with as much as were the murderous Daltons and Doolins, who were motley psychopathic lowlifes by comparison. The McCartys left their mark on the West as witnessed by the dozens of places that still bear their names. There are McCarty Creeks, Cabins, and Trails through­ out Colorado, Oregon, and Utah. As evident in this example, they were not just outlaws of the Northwest. At one time, nearly a quarter ofa million dollars in today’s monetary terms were offered in reward for their capture. What makes the book so readable is the amazing number of special interest incidents in the lives of the McCartys and the illustrations not only of people but of places and scenes connected with the characters. There is an extensive index, which shows literally hundreds of people the McCartys interacted with during the late 1880s and early 1900s. Names gleaned from years of research into court records, old newpapers, historical manuscripts, and books on local history add to the authenticity of the story. Subsequently, the Skovlins have offered the most comprehensive account written to date of the McCartys and Vaughans. Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Rick Wallach. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2001. 399 pages, $74.95/$27.95. Reviewed by Sara L. Spurgeon University of Arizona, Tucson Myth, Legend, Dust is, as editor Rick Wallach points out, the first compre­ hensive anthology of critical essays on Cormac McCarthy to arrive post-trilogy. Wallach has divided his text into sections— a large one dealing with McCarthy’s southern novels, what Wallach calls “The Appalachian Works,” another large section on “The Border Tetralogy,” and two smaller sections on McCarthy’s lesser-known dramas and the shared elements in the Appalachian and south­ western works. There is no overarching theme or particular school of criticism uniting these essays. They range from rather standard readings of narrative strategies in The Orchard Keeper (1965) to Marxist interpretations, feminist critiques, and an especially interesting essay on the ideology of representation in the south­ western novels by David Holloway. Some works, most notably Terri Witek’s Bo o k r e v ie w s 5 0 5 “He’s Hell When He’s Well,” have been published previously. Among the most fascinating and important of the essays included here are three discussing McCarthy’s euphonies and the evolution of his astonishing word play. Many of the big names in McCarthy criticism— Dianne Luce, Rick Wallach, Edwin Arnold— are present in the anthology, though mainly in the Appalachian section. Nevertheless, there are a number of strong essays dealing with the border tetralogy. Linda Townley Woodson’s ‘“ De los herejes y huerfanos’: The Sound and Sense of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction” interrogates McCarthy’s use of language and narrative, especially in the hands (or mouths) of his various storyteller characters. In ‘“ Mexico para los Mexicanos’: Revolution, Mexico, and McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” John Wegner examines the recurring motif of stories within stories contained in the metastory of the Mexican Revolution, and the power of myths and ideas able to leak through a dangerously permeable border. James Lilley’s fine “ ‘The Hands of Yet Other Puppets’: Figuring Freedom and Reading Repetition in All the Pretty Horses” wrestles with what is clearly one of McCarthy’s favorite metaphysical questions: “To what extent are we free to influence and control the patterns of our lives?” (272). Lilley employs Lacan’s theories of the inauthenticity of language and the hopelessness of human attempts to...

Yuman Belief Systems and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

When New York Times reporter Richard Woodward called Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian the bloodiest book since the Iliad, he was probably right (36). Rarely does one find a novel so full of maimings, murders, massacres, and general mayhem as this one, and upon first reading it can seem like nothing so much as one long uninterrupted bloodbath. Readers who fell in love with McCarthy's subsequent and much better-known novel All the Pretty Horses, who read that novel and then the whole of the Border Trilogy before deciding to track backward through the author's oeuvre, are often particularly put off. Certainly McCarthy's other novels have their share of violence, and a few moments that are especially eyecatching for their graphic nature, but Blood Meridian has them very easily beat. Upon closing the book, the reader's first quandary is what to do with all this blood.

A Cormac McCarthy companion: the border trilogy

With essays by Edwin T. Arnold, J. Douglas Canfield, Christine Chollier, George Guillemin, Dianne C. Luce, Jacqueline Scoones, Phillip A. Snyder, Nell Sullivan, and John Wegner The completion of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy--All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998)--marked major achievement in American literature. Only ten years earlier this now internationally acclaimed novelist had been called the best unknown writer in America. The trilogy is McCarthy's most ambitious project yet, composed at the height of his mature powers over period of fifteen years. It is a miracle in prose, as Robert Hass wrote of its middle volume, an unsentimental elegy for the lost world of the cowboy, the passing of the wilderness, and the fading innocence of post--World War II America. The trilogy is literary accomplishment with wide appeal, for despite the challenging materials in each book, these volumes remained on bestseller lists for many weeks. This collection of essays is the first book to examine these novels as trilogy, the first to read them as an integrated whole. Together these explorations of McCarthy's magnum opus serve as an ideal companion reader. Represented here are nine of the most notable Cormac McCarthy scholars, both American and European. Their essays provide substantial exploration of the trilogy from different perspectives. Included are gender issues, eco-critical approaches, explications of the war or land history underlying the trilogy, studies of narrative voice, dreams, the cowboy tradition, and the pastoral tradition, and considerations of McCarthy's moral and spiritual outlook. These essays complement one another in highly provocative ways, prompting new appreciation of the complexity of McCarthy's work and the profundity of his vision. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce are editors of Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (University Press of Mississippi). This new volume is an admirable companion to Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, bringing McCarthy scholarship into the 21st century.

In Search of a Further Frontier: Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy

In 1998, McCarthy published the third volume of his Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain, in which the protagonists of the previous two volumes, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, are brought together; their previously disparate narratives intersect, effecting the trilogy's thematic unification. In the first two works, Cole and Parham, feeling the encroachment of increasing urbanization, leave the American Southwest to seek a simpler, more pastoral existence in Mexico. However, in the third novel the pastoral dream of an idyllic life on the edge of the Mexican frontier is superseded by the grim reality of the corrupt border city of Juárez and its American counterpart, El Paso. Accordingly, by the end of Cities of the Plain it becomes clear that McCarthy's trilogy chronicles the death of the traditional American pastoral dream.

Multicultural Masculinities and the Border Romance in John Saylesis Lone Star and Cormac McCarthyis Border Trilogy

Americas, understandings of the United States as deeply tied to in cultural, economic, and affective ways are increasingly visible in contemporary popular culture, particularly movies and best-selling novels. For example, two recent films, Traffic and All the Pretty Horses, illustrate a heightened awareness of Mexico in the popular imagination, and they follow a long history of Hollywoods representations of Anglos and Mexicans in contact on the border. A number of these films have been called revisionist

Cormac McCarthy's western novels

In the continuing redefinition of the American West, few recent writers have left a mark as indelible as Cormac McCarthy. A favorite subject of critics and fans alike despite--or perhaps because of--his avoidance of public appearances, the man is known solely through his writing. Thanks to his early work, he is most often associated with a bleak vision of humanity grounded in a belief in man's primordial aggressiveness. McCarthy scholar Barcley Owens has written the first book to concentrate exclusively on McCarthy's acclaimed western novels: Blood Meridian, National Book Award winner All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. In a thought-provoking analysis, he explores the differences between Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy novels and shows how those differences reflect changing conditions in contemporary American culture. Owens captures both Blood Meridian's wanton violence and the Border Trilogy's fond remembrance of the Old West. He shows how this dramatic shift from atavistic brutality to nostalgic Americana suggests that McCarthy has finally given his readers what they most want--the stuff of their mythic dreams. Owens's study is both an incisive look at one of our most important and demanding authors and a penetrating analysis of violence and myth in American culture. Fans of McCarthy's work will find much to consider for ongoing discussions of this influential body of work.

McCarthy's the Border Trilogy

McCarthy's the Border Trilogy

"Peeping Toms on History": Barry Hannah's Never Die as Postmodern Western

In his thoughtful essay Home by Way of California: The Southerner as the Last European, Lewis P. Simpson explores what seem to him basic differences between the mind of the South and its western other. The latter, contends Simpson, has corollaries in the artistic vision of northeasterners--Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, and the father of the popular western, Owen Wister--who create fictions in which a hero transcends history amid the pristine, naturally democratic vistas of the American landscape. In contrast, the former extends a tragic European outlook that sees the individual as a creature trapped, the hapless victim of history. Simpson's paradigm has been very influential in southern studies, and one can indeed see how the tragic ethos he identifies informs to grand effect the body of southern writing produced during the fabled Renascence, a literature acutely concerned with the past in the present (to paraphrase Allen Tate's famous formulation) and the doomed yet heroic efforts to cope with or survive history, not escape it--reflected in Faulkner's famous proclamation in the Nobel speech that humanity will not merely endure, but prevail. Yet this South-versus-West theory tells only part of the story, for the West has, since the early nineteenth century, occupied a special place in the southern imagination. Historian Richard Slotkin notes in particular how southerners have mythologiz[ed] ... the Frontier ... as a new Garden of Eden; he locates this mythos in a Jeffersonian agrarianism in which the frontier ... promises complete felicity, the satisfaction of all demands and the reconciliation of all contradictions (69-70). No less a canonical southern text than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)--identified by both Tate and Louis D. Rubin as the first modern southern novel--bears out this representation, as Simpson himself tacitly admits. Huck's account shows that life is satisfying only when marked by a pastoral plenitude beyond the artificial and hypocritical constraints of southern (read eastern) culture, a realization that ultimately impels him to light out for the of the western frontier. Twain's story may lack the gunplay of the novels that were already beginning to gain popularity in the 1880s, but in its fusion of the southern pastoral and the unadulterated frontier, it is in many ways the prototypical western. Its influence continues as contemporary southern fictionists, including Charles Portis, Richard Ford, Ishmael Reed, and Cormac McCarthy, stake out territory west of the Mississippi. The popularity of McCarthy's The Border Trilogy confirms most decisively how alluring the West remains for southern writers and readers alike. Such recent authors, however, offer a more complicated version of the western than does Twain. Whereas the modern (or proto-modern) Huckleberry Finn helped establish the cultural authority of a mythologized West, its successors have done much to question that authority. In this respect, they might be called postmodern. The western's role as a totalizing construction that organizes history into a coherent, satisfying set of that essentialize American identity marks it as an example of what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls metanarrative.(1) For Lyotard and other noted theorists, postmodern art exhibits a thoroughgoing incredulity toward metanarratives and usually strives to undermine these overarching stories from within. Linda Hutcheon has shown that postmodern novels about the West, in particular, exhibit a contradictory attraction/repulsion to structure and patterns that uses and abuses the western as a genre, ultimately destabilizing the historical, political, and personal fantasies it tries to fulfill (133). One of the most well-known novels by a southerner to do this is McCarthy's prelude to The Border Trilogy, Blood Meridian (1985). This fascinating account of exploitation and violence parodies Huckleberry Finn and later westerns. …

Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (review)

Reviewed by: Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy Willard Greenwood Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Rev. Ed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. vi + 256 pp. The introduction, by editors Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, who also contributed two essays apiece, explains why one of America’s greatest living novelists went undiscovered for almost twenty-five years. Of the eleven essays in this collection, three are devoted to the novel that distinguished McCarthy as a rare and astounding novelist, Blood Meridian. These diverse and remarkable essays examine historical sources, Gnosticism, and nihilism as elements crucial to understanding the work itself. The criticism also analyzes McCarthy’s imaginative critique of Manifest Destiny in the Southwest and Mexico, which also seems, somehow, a history of the world. Joseph Sepich’s essay, already well-known to McCarthy scholars, impeccably traces the historical sources of Blood Meridian and is indispensable to an understanding of the novel as historical fiction. Steven Shaviro’s philosophical reading of the novel helps to explain the sublime forces that will continue to horrify and to attract readers. Leo Daugherty’s essay, “Gravers False and True: Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy,” might cause those familiar with the rest of McCarthy’s work to consider Gnosticism as one way of understanding the theosophy that guides so much of it. There was a more local yet still universal element to McCarthy’s fiction before the watershed event of Blood Meridian. His four southern novels are treated more thoroughly here simply because they are better known to scholars than the Border trilogy. They are written in a more dense, Faulknerian style than the Border trilogy. Luce’s essay on The Crossing, one of McCarthy’s most difficult works, offers the compelling analysis that the figurative and literal wandering undertaken by Billy Parham is “a matrix of intersecting stories, partial or complete, often competing, with varying relationships to the truth, cutting across and interwoven with the apparently simple linearity of the road narrative of Billy’s life.” Some of McCarthy’s readers and critics were a bit disappointed by his works following The Crossing. Arnold’s essay, “The Last of the Trilogy: First Thoughts on Cities of the Plain,” seems to have this collective puzzlement in mind. He argues for a contextual reading of the novel, [End Page 1026] suggesting that we must read it in concert with the first two novels. Regarding the end of the trilogy, Arnold is right to assert that “we have come to the end of something magnificent.” Arnold’s call to scholarly patience is sound advice for measuring the full worth of this novel in relation to McCarthy’s body of work. Readers may be most eager to get to the essays of the better-known works first, but the essays on the southern novels provide important insights into the novels that existed before McCarthy’s mass exposure. David Paul Ragan and Thomas D. Young, respectively, provide clear and astute interpretations of The Orchard Keeper and Suttree. Ragan’s essay clarifies the obscurity of the characters’ familial and symbolic relationships while also emphasizing the larger social context. He shows how the lives of the characters of rural Tennessee are subtly yet permanently altered by modern bureaucracy. Young’s essay on Suttree examines the familial and social fallout of a community’s cultural and economic shift from a collapsing agrarian mode to a depressed modern industrial mode. At the center of this change is the eponymous Suttree, who unconsciously resists and negotiates this massive social change by repeatedly drinking himself into oblivion. The essays on the southern novels may seem a bit dated since they themselves precede the entire Border trilogy. However, some of their value lies in their being uninfluenced by interpretations of McCarthy’s later work, a state of scholarly innocence that is irretrievable. John Grammer’s and Edwin Arnold’s essays on pastoralism and morality, respectively, identify recurring themes throughout the southern novels. Such an approach is necessary in order to begin the massive task of thinking about the novels as a group. For all of the attention given to the connection between McCarthy and the South and Faulkner, Grammer’s...

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

The Crossing. The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

The Crossing. The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy

All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

182 Western American Literature other hand, what does come through in this study is a keen sense of Estes’s love of writing and his enthusiastic and prolific profiling of rural Texas life. While William Humphrey’s career has fared comparatively better, there is considerable doubt whether he is even a westerner or that his work reflects anything that is inherently western. In the introductory section of his study, Mark Royden Winchell admits that the locus of much of Humphrey’s writing is just “200 miles west of Oxford, Mississippi,... where the ‘South draws to a stop’ and the West begins.”This statement is in itself rather problematic; most would agree that the West begins somewhere around the 100th meridian, far from Clarksville in east Texas. The problem here may be Winchell’s confusion of rural with western, and indeed the two have much in common, but few would concede that a book with a rural setting such as, say, Winesburg, Ohiois a western book. This confusion is intensified by Winchell’s citing numerous critics who link Humphrey’s work with Faulkner’s. If Winchell’s sense of geography is debatable, his critical eye is strong and lucid as he digs into the crux of Hum phrey’s writing with an explication that is both penetrating and sound. Edward Butscher’s study of Peter Wild is both interesting and disappoint­ ing. First off, many would agree that Wild is at his best as an essayist. That Butscher focuses exclusively on Wild’s poetry at the expense of his other writing is disappointing. Conversely, this limited focus should also be the source of considerable interest for readers who prefer Wild the poet to Wild the prose stylist. The problem here is not, however, with Butscher’s subject matter so much as with the way he writes. His pleonastic discussion of Wild’s highly personal poetics comes dangerously close to lucubration, to academic parody; yet in Butscher’s defense it is quite likely that writing about prose is significantly easier than working with poetry. Or is it? All in all, these five studies provide clear testimony to both the breadth and vitality of western literary scholarship. And if some of these efforts are less than perfect, each adds to the layer of understanding necessary for continued growth in western letters. (^BILL D. TOTH Western New Mexico University All thePretty Horses. By Cormac McCarthy. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. 302 pages, $21.00.) After his first four novels, from The Orchard Keeper (1965) through Suttree (1982), Cormac McCarthy’s regional reputation was Southern, and his renown primarily stylistic. Commentators made comparisons with artists as diverse as Sam Peckinpah and Jorge Luis Borges. Then the Protean McCarthy produced Blood Meridian (1985), a tale of the West that mixed grotesque violence and grotesque humor and delineations that both drew on and mocked the conven­ Reviews 183 tions of eighteenth-century novels and epic plots in general, altering his re­ gional identification and adding to his reputation as a prose-wizard and an original visionary. All the Pretty Horses, winner of the 1992 National Book Award, is the first volume of a promised border trilogy, and will attract much attention to McCarthy as a writer of the West, and one who seeks to combine the impulses of the Modernist and the nineteenth-century traditions. This novel is a mustread . McCarthy’s story is elemental: at once abandoned and freed by the death of his grandfather, the divorce of his parents, and the sale of the family ranch near San Angelo, sixteen-year-old John Grady Cole sets out in the late 1940s with a friend on ajourney south, crossing on horseback into the last great approxima­ tion of a dry frontier, Mexico. Into this traditional quest paradigm, McCarthy puts elements of western on-the-road picaresque, and later the purest pastoraland -romance interludes, the dense accretions of social-manners realism, the horror of captivity narratives, the suspense of the cross-country chase, the necessity of an ending. His particular skill is to draw energy from each of these sources without giving allegiance to any of them. His two most memorable characters, in fact, spring from...