An Uncommon Western

            

"Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.” (p. 3)

As we read these lines we begin to think we are in a “Western” novel when John Grady Cole (we aren't told his name until four pages later) walks “out on the prairie”. But is this really a Western novel or some other kind that is merely located in the darkness of the southwest of the United States at the end of the 1940s?

The western as a genre accentuates the American spirit and often includes, in addition to the prairie, a more sinister landscape with its Indian foes, gunfights, rough crossings, along with the darkness of the night in spite of the light of the starry sky. The sinister landscape and more is provided in McCarthy's novel and in a way that makes the western question less important than the relationship of John Grady to the world and his place in it.

D.H. Lawrence, no stranger to the American southwest, noted regarding the myth of the west: “But you have there the myth of the essential white American. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust are a sort of by play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

John Grady may be some of these things, a killer only reluctantly, but in my reading of All the Pretty Horses I recognized some of the symbols of the western as it has been mythologized in prose and on film. However underlying the veneer of a familiar genre there is an unfamiliar foundation – that is something that transcends mere sinister landscapes.

Hints of this foundation can be found on the first page; in “the image of the candleflame” and the “dark and cold” that permeates the opening of the novel. We are reminded of this foundation repeatedly as we travel with John Grady on his odyssey into the world of wild horses waiting to be tamed and Mexican culture that tries and fails to tame John Grady.

Just a few of the moments that provide material for the foundation include the following: his Grandfather's tales (p 11); his contemplation of the Pleiades and “the wildness about him, the wildness within” (p 60); “the iron dark of the world” (p 67); “that condition of separate and helpless paralysis which seemed to be among them like a creeping plague” (p 105); and, “He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.” (pp 256-7)

John Grady has one defense against this mindlessness and all of the difficulties and hardships of the world around him, the world with its foundation in a mystical darkness. That defense is his almost preternatural connection with horses. This is made clear again and again, but perhaps best in his dream:

“That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain . . . and in the dream he was among the horses running . . . and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.” (pp 161-2)

It is this defense that allows John Grady to become the “horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.” (p 302)

One may wonder what the world to come will be like with its “darkening land” but John Grady will be there. Will it be a new west, home to new western tales? Perhaps, but if the tales are told by Cormac McCarthy they will have a portentous patina that palpitates with a sinister darkness, danger and, perhaps even blood.