Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession

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Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession

Discussed in this essay:
• The Orchard Keeper, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 256 pp.
• Outer Dark, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 256 pp.
• Child of God, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $13.95. 206 pp.
• Suttree, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 480 pp.
• Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 352 pp.
• All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 320 pp.
• The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 432 pp.
• Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 292 pp.
• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.00. 309 pp.
• The Road, Cormac McCarthy. Vintage. $14.95. 287 pp.

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The Border Trilogy

Just as Blood Meridian’s ambiguity and moral uncertainty owe much to the aesthetics of Vietnam, The Border Trilogy’s moral clarity seems rooted in the American spirit of the time: in this case, the hangover of the Reagan ’80s and the ethic of right and wrong inspired by the end of the Cold War, the first Iraq War, and the intervention in the former Yugoslavia. In addition to these extra-literary reasons, McCarthy seems to be at pains to paint these books in black and white because he knows he is writing allegories, and thus they require broad strokes in order to function properly.

The Border Trilogy is certainly not nearly as realist as McCarthy’s first four novels, or even as realist as Blood Meridian. It has been previously commented that John Grady and Billy are far too able as cowboys to be believable. Whether breaking a horse, muzzling a wolf, or shooting game, they never struggle to do anything; they just do it, much like an epic hero might.

McCarthy further breaks from realism by showing a complete lack of interest in defining characters beyond archetypical everymen and -women. John Grady and Billy are the expert horsemen: they are good and strong and proud. Villains are irredeemably villainous—that may be a tautology, but it is a necessary one, as McCarthy’s antagonists offer few traits to drape on them beyond their villainous nature. Many characters hardly exist except as they are needed to fit a situation—thus a blind man is blind because being unable to see lets him make portentous, quasi-philosophical statements that draw from his disability. A priest who has lost his faith appears just long enough to deliver his tale. Like the judge’s monologues, these fables draw on the uncanny element inherent in Melville when characters suddenly step out of life-and-death situations to deliver metaphysical statements—yet whereas the judge was an integrated part of his book, these characters feel grafted, less an organic part of the story than something designed to fill a need. That need not necessarily be a flaw, except that McCarthy tries to join these necessarily false elements to the very true life-and-death struggles of his protagonists, and the two make for an awkward whole.

Nowhere is the allegorical nature of The Border Trilogy more apparent than in The Crossing, a very strange work by McCarthy’s standards. At first its proliferating stories within stories make it seem like McCarthy’s second attempt at a polyphonic novel, but it eventually becomes apparent that this is not the case: the same few philosophical principles operate behind the scenes throughout each story. Thus, as the stories more and more come to resemble one another, The Crossing resolves into the sustained deployment of a single view of the universe, one that, unfortunately, does not grow more elaborate as the novel progresses but only more repetitive. ¹

This single-minded philosophizing contrasts sharply with the rather rich view McCarthy offers of the land of The Border Trilogy: an evaporating American cowboy lifestyle post-World War II and a post-Revolution Mexico embittered that after the death of so many millions the Mexican people have essentially exchanged one set of rich men for another. ² The trilogy’s two main protagonists, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, both make multiple border crossings, spending large parts of their adolescences wandering Mexico’s north, and their personal stories come to overlap the great changes occurring in these border regions. As they cross back and forth again and again, John Grady and Billy become trapped between worlds, and their lives are essentially tragic: as Philip A. Snyder poignantly writes, “John Grady’s dying young with little compromise and Billy’s living old with much accommodation amount to essentially the same thing in the end.”

The Crossing, almost as large at the other two books in the trilogy combined, follows Billy Parham throughout the northern wilds of Mexico as he pursues a quest with no tangible goal, no logical rationale, not even any means of measuring progress. Years before, Billy caught a wolf marauding on his father’s land, but instead of killing it as he was instructed he seeks to bring it back to Mexico. There he is caught up in a struggle over the wolf (which is killed), and then after the wolf’s death he wanders Mexico. When Billy returns home years later he finds his parents murdered, and he and his brother set off to Mexico for revenge, without the slightest clue of who the murderers are. Their only hope is to find their parents’ stolen horses and by that identify the killers.

This is obviously a quest doomed before it begins, and Billy can only persist by following the mirage of imminent success. Like the idea of meaning conceived of by the post-structuralists, Billy’s goal always lies just a little bit farther down the road, yet always dissolving upon approach. This also embodies McCarthy’s philosophy for the trilogy, one clearly descended from the judge’s view of the world: in the midst of the adventure, Billy cannot grasp the meaning of his own life or even actively define it, and it is only in retrospect, once the shape of it is open to view, that he can begin to theorize as to what he was. In the words of one character: “The lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the witness has power to take its measure.”

It must be said that the action of The Crossing, as well as that of All the Pretty Horses and Cities of The Plain, is sound. When McCarthy is describing his beloved “reddening” sun, a knife-fight to the death, roping a horse, or even the sudden impact of an owl with a windshield, the writing is clearly his own and beyond imitation. There is a very good narrative in The Border Trilogy, one wherein McCarthy eulogizes the death of an American era and of a way of life. The trilogy’s first book, All the Pretty Horses, ends in the 1950s with the foreboding image of a bull “roiling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment.” The sunset itself “passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.” The Crossing ends with a sign of the changing times: a very oblique description of the first atomic weapon test as seen from just before dawn in the Southwestern landscape. Cities of the Plain’s threnodic intent is clear just from the title, which borrows plainly from the Bible: “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of those cities, and that which grew upon the ground.” The trilogy concludes around the millennium, offering a glimpse of Billy’s old-age in a world that has clearly passed him by.

Despite the trilogy’s successes, these books are marred by McCarthy’s overreach. His best allegories are boiled down to just one or two key characters that he can place into conflict, but The Border Trilogy is rife with characters intended to work on a symbolic level, and in their multitudes they feel poorly cared for and poorly integrated. The symbols in The Border Trilogy tend to be to overdetermined (they sometimes read as though McCarthy was channeling Hesse in a particularly pedantic mood); they don’t accumulate shades of meaning but rather are restricted to one clear purpose. ³

The allegorical impact of most characters is deadened by the fact that they only appear long enough to deliver their bit of wisdom and then disappear. This failure is all the more clear when considering the one symbol in The Border Trilogy that shows signs of actual presence and subtlety: the wolf that Billy returns to Mexico during the first quarter of The Crossing. The wolf becomes an enigmatic symbol precisely because it sticks around as Billy passes through various regions and systems, becoming an integral part of several potent scenes of conflict. No other symbol in these allegories gets nearly as much stage-time as the wolf, and all of them are impoverished for their lack.

In McCarthy’s defense, it must be said that his symbol/characters bristle with the imaginative detail that a force like McCarthy is capable of. At times their statements are quite beautiful: a blinded revolutionary’s thoughts on the nature of blindness sound like those of one who truly knows the condition:

Finally he said that in his first years of darkness his dreams had been vivid beyond all expectation and that he had come to thirst for them but that dreams and memories alike had faded one by one until there were no more. Of all that once had been no trace remained. The look of the world. The faces of loved ones. Finally even his own person was lost to him. Whatever he had been he was no more. He said that like every man who comes to the end of something there was nothing to be done but to begin again. I can’t remember the world of light, he said. It has been so long. The world is a fragile world. Ultimately, what can be seen is what endures. What is true. . . .

In my first years of blindness, I thought it was a form of death. I was wrong. Losing one’s sight is like falling in a dream. You think there’s no bottom to this abyss. You fall and fall. Light recedes. Memory of light. Memory of the world. Of your own face. Of the grim-faced mask. [my translation]

These thoughts bear the mark of literature, but other remarks made by McCarthy’s iterant philosophers come off as cheap. For instance, after a lengthy and tense exchange that leads up to the revelation of one character’s “secret,” we should hear something better than “the secret . . . is that in this world the mask is what’s true.” [my translation] Occasionally these remarks come off as powerful, if only because McCarthy’s storytelling abilities make them seem so, but upon closer reflection they seem more and more like cardboard walls.

If The Border Trilogy is not McCarthy’s best work, nor is it a complete failure. It was a worthy experiment, one that marks some important signposts for McCarthy’s development as a novelist. Moving cleanly away from the Appalachian novels, McCarthy has clearly ceased to wonder about the individual’s agency in navigating his own life: rather, he proclaims that all individual agency is illusion and he tries to show how men invent so many different stories about the one sinuous path that each must walk. Furthermore, in these books he has situated his morals into a historical time and place more clearly and more consciously than in any previous works. Whereas the Appalachian novels were deeply enmeshed in the individual to the exclusion of the outside world, The Border Trilogy is just the opposite: a cast of everymen is orchestrated to embody a larger truth about the Southwest border regions in the 1940s and ’50s. Their struggles are the archetypical struggles of many cowboys as the ranchlands of the border regions finally gave way to suburbanization and modernization. ⁴ Moreover, McCarthy here seems to express a potent nostalgia for America in this era, implying that the counterculture movements of the ’60s and the Vietnam War were a mortal blow to the America that once was.

Stylistically, great changes are also afoot: the prose, though often lush when describing nature, is more stripped-down than anything we’ve previously seen. It is as though McCarthy started the trilogy with a list of things that would exist in his world (the red sun, horses, beautiful women, etc.)—these he describes obsessively, but everything else might as well not exist.

Cities of the Plain is particularly minimalist: it is a Western stripped of anything that might add nuance to the archetypical figures and the doomed love story. Many of the cowboys in Cities are hardly anything more than disembodied dialogue; they have no body to speak of, and even if they did McCarthy would give them nothing to do with it. The only characters who even rise to the level of flatness are John Grady and Billy, and then only because we can remember their descriptions from the trilogy’s first two volumes. To this ethereality McCarthy mixes in a heavy dose of pregnant conversations that, though they generally sound like things cowboys might say to one another, nonetheless feel too freighted with meaning.

It is an achievement, although not necessarily a worthwhile one, that in his next book, No Country for Old Men, McCarthy will manage to make his plot even less resistant to friction . . .

¹ Misappropriating Bakhtin, some have argued that, as the novel is a generally dialogic form, The Border Trilogy is a conversation between various voices in the text. To view this incredulity-begging approach in action see, for example, Christine Chollier, “Autotextuality, or Dialogic Imagination in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.”
² See “Wars and Rumors of Wars,” John Wegner, and “Cowboy Codes” Philip A. Snyder.
³ Perhaps worst of all, the trilogy concludes with a completely unnecessary, 30-page epilogue where, in case you weren’t sure of what McCarthy has been at pains to communicate for over 1,000 pages, he walks you through it one last time.
⁴ In an odd, but nonetheless instructive, sort of way, the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez of Cities of the Plain makes a worthwhile, naïve-but-nonetheless-deadly counterpart to Roberto Bolano’s urban horror, Santa Teresa.

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