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Genre and the geographies of violence: Cormac McCarthy and the contemporary western.

Author: Kollin, Susan. Source: Contemporary Literature v. 42 no3 (Fall 2001) p. 557-88 ISSN: 0010-7484 Number: BHUM01036183 Copyright: The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/.


One of the more interesting aspects of the Western is the way southerners have figured centrally in the genre's development. Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian, for instance, is widely credited with introducing Americans to the cult of the cowboy in a story that features a transplanted southerner who joins forces with a group of powerful Wyoming cattle ranchers in order to make the West safe for frontier capitalism. Philip French long ago attempted to account for the genre's interest in the southerner, pointing out that a large part of the new itinerant labor force in the post-Civil War West was made up of former Confederate soldiers. For French, this development partly explains why the "dispossessed Southerner" has come to figure so prominently as the model for the chivalrous cowboy (94). More recently, Peter Stanfield has traced the southern origins of another western icon, the singing cowboy. Emerging out of the Dixie medicine shows of the 1930s and 1940s, the singing cowboy served an important function in American culture, ridding southern vernacular music of its racial connotations in order to make country music more respectable and marketable to white audiences (100).

These interconnected histories of the South and the West continue to hold strong as Cormac McCarthy--one of the South's most famous living writers--has emerged in recent years as one of the West's most important storytellers. In Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, McCarthy produced his own brand of regional hybridity, showing the Western as deeply dependent on the contributions and concerns of southern literature.(FN1) Bringing elements of the southern grotesque to bear on western themes and conventions, McCarthy added a grimmer, bleaker vision to the genre, providing what appeared to be the definitive statement on Manifest Destiny. With the publication of Cities of the Plain in 1998, the third installment of his Border Trilogy, McCarthy continues to be credited with transforming the genre, taking on its cherished myths while subjecting them to new critical scrutiny.

When his anti-Western Blood Meridian was published in 1985, McCarthy seemed to have little competition among other Anglo writers in this regard. His closest rival was fellow Texas author Larry McMurtry, whose early works included Horseman, Pass By and The Last Picture Show, both of which helped reformulate the genre. Remade as the movie Hud in 1962, Horseman, Pass By tells the story of a morally bankrupt cowboy who tries to sell off his family's diseased cattle to unsuspecting buyers before authorities can have them destroyed. Made as a film in 1971, The Last Picture Show builds on the theme of the West as depraved and corrupted space, with the characters in a small Texas town living empty, dead-end lives that barely resemble the possibilities and promises dreamed up by the region's earlier white settlers. As anti-Westerns, both narratives play off conventions of the genre, featuring the region and its characters as fully exhausted; according to Mark Busby, these portrayals of Texas proved to be so bleak to audiences at the time that they succeeded in angering nearly everyone in the state (23).

While these novels exposed the genre for its false ideals and unfulfilled promises, McMurtry appeared to move away from this sensibility in subsequent books. Busby accounts for this ambivalence by arguing that McMurtry's fictional treatment of Texas comes out of a larger tradition of white southwestern writing that regards the landscape and its Anglo settlers in a divided manner, often characterizing them both sympathetically and critically (43). These split loyalties may have influenced responses to his 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Lonesome Dove. Made into a successful television miniseries in the late 1980s, Lonesome Dove helped rejuvenate the Western for American audiences, setting the stage for a new cycle of the genre by the early 1990s. Over the years, however, McMurtry has bemoaned the text's reception, arguing that audiences have largely misread the novel as just another Western story featuring traditional cowboy heroism and frontier dreams, rather than as a critical reworking of the genre's codes and conventions (Busby 237).

McMurtry's comments demonstrate that literary reception is always unstable, that indeterminacy shapes all textual readings; at the same time, however, his comments highlight a certain strangeness that has long plagued the Western. Forrest G. Robinson addresses the ways Western literary discourse often betrays a "pattern of doubleness," or what he calls "self-subversion," in which contradictory moral impulses compete for dominance in the narrative (3). The "textual unconsciousness" of Westerns, he argues, frequently works against the surface of the narrative, undermining in turn what the text appears "so clearly to approve" (2):.

P opular Western texts approach and retreat from a contested center, and they enable a similar pattern of address and withdrawal in their readers. They operate through a variety of dodges and feints, displacements and tradeoffs, dimly concealed acknowledgments and dimly acknowledged concealments. They have endured ... because they give us a window on major cultural embarrassments, and because they open it no more than half way. Indeed, we are compelled to return to these subtly mingled narratives precisely because we never see them fully through.

(2-3).

If we take seriously Robinson's observations about the self-subversion of traditional Westerns, the ways even classic Westerns contain elements that overturn their dominant themes, then the generic distinctions defining Western texts as traditional or revisionist ultimately fail us, as the concept of a purely faithful or fully critical text loses its explanatory power.(FN2) If classic Westerns contain moments of resistance and self-reflection, carrying with them their own critique, to what extent might anti-Westerns preserve moments of desire, moments of connection and identification with elements of the classic Western? Perhaps the genre might better be understood as a continuum, its critique operating along a spectrum. On the one end may be found the classic Western, which upholds--with varying degrees of success--the codes and conventions of the form, its Anglo male protagonist, and the national project, but which contains resistant elements that undermine its cultural logic and status as a discrete, coherent entity. On the other end may be found the anti-Western, itself an unstable and shifting form that engages in a critical dialogue with the genre but that is also shaped by a certain desire for and attraction to the classic features of the Western. By understanding the Western as a genre structured by competing and contradictory impulses, audiences may make better sense of McCarthy's--and by extension McMurtry's--shifting treatment of the form.(FN3).

Having relocated from the South to the West, McCarthy moved away from the southern thematics and oratorical style he employed in his writing through Blood Meridian, relying instead on the idioms and conventions of the Western. Steven Tatum has described this turn from the southern to the western as a movement from a wide range of diction and an emphasis on violence to a more circumscribed use of dialogue and a greater emphasis on romance (477). Tatum suggests that in the movement from Blood Meridian to the Border Trilogy, McCarthy offers a retelling of the same story, providing continuity to the four novels and challenging the basis of the Western, as readers are forced to examine the elements of self-delusion necessary to maintain the epistemological foundations of the genre (477-78). McCarthy's Westerns share additional elements that provide continuity but also pose problems in terms of the critical vision they offer, problems that are inherent to the project of parody itself. As Judith Butler points out, parody always relies on a prior affiliation with the object one parodies; in subverting the logic of a text, parody itself is a destabilized critical practice. Parody, Butler argues, requires an intimacy "that troubles the voice, the bearing, the performativity of the subject such that the audience or the reader does not quite know where it is you stand, whether you have gone over to the other side, whether you remain on your side, whether you can rehearse that other position without falling prey to it in the midst of the performance" (34-35).

If, as Robinson argues, classic Westerns operate as divided texts, offering a critique (even if a limited one) of their own dominant logic, then anti-Westerns do not necessarily avoid the problem of self-subversion, as they are often unable to escape the very thing they seek to dismantle but instead are drawn into an intimacy and affiliation that destabilizes the critical effort. Critics have noted that as McCarthy moves away from the traditions of southern writing toward the problems and concerns of the Western, his novels seem to lose some of the transgressive elements that marked his earlier work. In trying to account for the differences and continuities between Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy, I argue that the generic constraints of the Western and the inability of parody to offer a stable, immutable critique must be assessed in making sense of McCarthy's complicated reworking of Western myths and sensibilities. Both the Western and the anti-Western, in other words, pose problems for revisionist efforts in ways that have not been fully addressed in the scholarship on McCarthy.

THE DESECRATED WEST

As an anti-Western, McCarthy's Blood Meridian may well offer the most brutal literary treatment of frontier themes in American history. Tom Pilkington, for instance, once described the novel as "the illegitimate offspring of Zane Grey and Flannery O'Connor," with the Marquis de Sade serving as the "delivering physician" (312). In seeking to dismantle the codes of the Western, the narrative interrogates regional and national identities in order to expose the underside of frontier life. Based on historical events in the American Southwest during the mid-nineteenth century, the book follows the actions of John Glanton's gang of Indian scalpers as they wreak havoc on the land's inhabitants. Unlike the classic Western, Blood Meridian does not offer a region whose promise and possibility were somehow lost at a certain point in history, but a West fully corrupted from the moment Anglos arrived. The western landscape that is supposed to be a test of character, bringing out the best in the hero and the worst in the villain, is emptied of its sacred qualities, becoming instead a fully defiled, profaned space. And unlike Westerns that depict the region as a prelapsarian garden and space of retreat for the American hero, McCarthy's text features an anti-Edenic landscape whose ownership is violently contested and overturned by the group of mercenaries. The novel provides numerous descriptions of the West as a desecrated and violent terrain, with death serving as "the most prevalent feature of this landscape" (48). This West is a "terra damnata" (61), a "purgatorial waste" (63), a region lit by a "urinecolored sun" (47). McCarthy accounts for this sun in great detail, at one point writing that it "rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them" (44-45).

If Blood Meridian may be thought of as an anti-Western, its narrative vision is more Sam Peckinpah than Robert Altman, its treatment of violence in no way restrained or confined, but anarchic and pushed to the extreme. Whereas Altman's critiques of the Western in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976) were presented with a relatively clear political position, Peckinpah used parody in a manner that often subverted his critical vision. His films typically featured a hyperviolent masculinity, and his vision of the region was much harder to discern. Over the years, however, Peckinpah's film The Wild Bunch (1969) has come to hold a more significant place in movie history than Altman's Westerns. Like McCarthy's literary reinterpretation of the Western in Blood Meridian, The Wild Bunch continues to baffle those who disagree about the nature and scope of Peckinpah's treatment of the genre. In McCarthy's novel, descriptions of the hypermasculine Western landscape show authorial disengagement from the forms of nationalism typically featured in the Western; however, his parody perplexes those who contend that it threatens to reinstate the gendered and mythic violence of the region.

Indeed, as the novel's title suggests, nation-building functions as a bloody act in the text, with violence ensuring the success of United States encroachment in the Southwest. McCarthy's portrayal of American brutality rips the lid off sentimental understandings of the past; page after page, as bodies pile up, readers marvel at McCarthy's ability to imagine new means of describing human atrocity. The book's unrelenting focus on the violent history of American expansion has been denounced as excessive. Blood Meridian has been accused of being both "pornographically" violent and "terribly beautiful" (Jarrell 32; Winchell 309); it has been criticized for its obsessive detailing of the horrific depravity of the gang of mercenaries while overindulging in Faulknerian prose (Shaviro 149; Arnold and Luce 1).

As many critics have suggested, the project of dismantling violence through excess carries its own risks, a problem that has plagued both literary and cinematic anti-Westerns. In Blood Meridian, the representation of violence threatens to undermine the critical sensibilities of the novel, as McCarthy's graphic treatment of Anglo brutality becomes aestheticized to the extent that audiences often experience a strange pleasure in reading these hyperviolent meditations. Barcley Owens suggests that McCarthy's last gothic text gives readers a "thrill" which is disturbing in that it leaves us "dumbstruck, tingling, guilty in our participation" (xiii). Like anti-Western filmmakers of a previous era, such as Peckinpah and Sergio Leone--both of whom helped establish new standards for cinematic critiques of the genre's savagery--McCarthy renders this brutality sublime and, as such, has been accused of producing "hymns of violence" in his Western (Shaviro 145). In the early 1970s, during the heyday of critical cinematic Westerns, Philip French argued that the more seriously violence is taken in the Western, the more likely its expression will offend the accepted conventions of entertainment (114). "Westerns most opposed to violence," he suggested, " often turn out to be the most violent" (118). French's observations about the cultural work of violence might be extended to McCarthy's writings. After all, doesn't the brutality of a classic Western like The Virginian prove to be even more gratuitous, formulaic, and therefore dangerous than that of a text such as Blood Meridian, which takes seriously its violence to the extent that it refuses to allow audience approval of these acts? Jenni Calder argues in this vein, suggesting that "there are times when to push known violence out of sight is irresponsible" (124). Although Owen Wister grieves a bit over the hangings in The Virginian, he does not give readers a glimpse of the actual events in the novel. If readers witnessed what the hero committed, Calder points out, the character might lose his heroic status (123).

McCarthy's use of violence thus complicates the tradition of the western hero. Rather than allowing the figure to claim redemption through acts of conquest, the novel provides readers with a horrific portrayal of a westerner who offers nothing in the way of heroism. Perhaps more than any other genre, the Western has relied on establishing a certain kind of cultural hero. As Calder explains, "The code is a strict one: decency, courage, loyalty, not just for their own sake but because they are the things that make life bearable" (176). She points out that in The Virginian, Wister's hero has a certain "boyishness and charm"; any elements that might be considered unwholesome have to be purged from his character in order to allow him to remain sympathetic with audiences (197). Over the years, however, the western hero with his rigid codes of honor has become saddled with a Boy Scout image, while the genre itself has faced criticism for being an adolescent form. For many critics, even those enthusiastic about the genre, the Western becomes a serious object of inquiry only at the moment when it develops "adult" topics, when it begins to meditate on subjects such as the problems of frontier violence or the hero's ambivalence toward the codes (Calder 198; Cawelti, Six-Gun Mystique 41; Slotkin 380).

By rethinking the innocence of the western hero, focusing in particular on the figure of the child, McCarthy intervenes in these understandings of the genre. In Blood Meridian, the American Adam, the nation's most important frontier figure and symbol of innocence, becomes transformed into a savage, feral youth (Lewis 5). Portrayed here by a character known only as "the kid," McCarthy's antihero moves from Tennessee to Texas, where he eventually joins a band of scalp-hunters. Far from being a virtuous or upright character, the kid rivals the adults in his capacity for brutality. The novel holds out little hope for this character, who is clearly not a symbol for the region's promise or its future. Throughout the text, the kid instead serves as an allegorical figure for a depraved America--the youthful nation--which is portrayed here as fallen and corrupted from its very inception, an entity as immoral and tainted as the Old World against which it defines itself.

In presenting the figure of the youth in this manner, Blood Meridian also works against a central theme in American literary history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Anglo-American literature has frequently demonstrated an obsession with the state of childhood. Figured as a time uncorrupted by reason, childhood has functioned as a moment of superior insight for writers, a space in which feeling and sentiment substitute for judgment and reason. In his classic study The Reign of Wonder, Tony Tanner notes that the naive vision of the child has been put to far-ranging uses in American literary history. "A major problem facing white American writers was simply, overwhelmingly, the need to recognize and contain a new continent," Tanner explains. "The wondering vision was adopted as a prime method of inclusion and assimilation" and still functions as the "preferred way of dealing with experience and confronting existence" (10). Throughout American literature, the "reign of wonder" in turn has come to serve particular social interests by promoting the dominant culture's uses of the land as seemingly innocent and uncorrupted.

Although the figure of the youth appears in nearly all of McCarthy's writings, Blood Meridian shows an interest in rethinking the function of childlike wonder in American literature. The novel opens with a parody of the tradition:.

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire....

At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark....

A year later he is in Saint Louis. He is taken on for New Orleans aboard a flatboat. Forty-two days on the river. At night the steamboats hoot and trudge past through the black waters all alight like cities adrift. They break up the float and sell the lumber and he walks in the streets and hears tongues he has not heard before. He lives in a room above a courtyard behind a tavern and he comes down at night like some fairybook beast to fight with the sailors.

(3-4).

Beginning the text with a description of the kid's exploits, McCarthy's narrator adopts the singsong voice of children's literature. Using stilted sentence structure and little or no analysis of character or events, the narrative, in its school primer form, appears emptied of any sophistication or worldliness. The voice of wonder with its innocence, however, is soon stripped of artlessness as we watch the kid move further and further away from this simplicity; extended for several pages, the voice finally serves as little more than a parody of America's youthful promise.

As several critics have pointed out, the novel's beginning also establishes the main character as a corrupted reversal of Huck Finn, the nation's most famous boy narrator. By recasting the voice of wonder associated with Huck, McCarthy unsettles the comfort and solace that the youthful point of view typically provides Anglo audiences. In his introduction to the character, McCarthy writes that the kid "can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man" (3). With the corruptions of history and a penchant for violence already present in the boy, he requires no fall from grace and receives in turn no pity from readers. Throughout the novel, the kid willingly takes part in massacres, becoming as defiled and savage as the adult men. When he is caught by Mexican officials and imprisoned, several small boys lean over the wall above him, trying to urinate on the prisoners as they sleep below. The men in turn throw rocks up at the boys. The kid's aim is the most successful; his stone--"the size of an egg"--manages to make contact with one of the children, dropping him "cleanly from the wall with no sound other than the muted thud of its landing on the far side" (71). Like Peckinpah's group of children who torture scorpions in the opening of The Wild Bunch, the youthful characters in Blood Meridian are emptied of their innocence and purity, and prove to be just as caught up in violence and savagery as the adults. Rather than treating the children sentimentally, the novel considers them to be as threatening and expendable as any of the other figures in the text. The kid, for instance, is portrayed as dangerous from birth, his mother becoming his first victim, a figure who "did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off" (3).

McCarthy likewise reevaluates myths of national identity in the novel. When he describes the kid as arriving in Texas on a boat, "a pilgrim among others," McCarthy profanes the nation's sacred origins (5). When he describes the black slaves in the fields, "their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton ... a shadowed agony in the garden," McCarthy parodies the country's pastoral longings (4). By recasting the myth of the innocent American and his quest to expand the frontier, the novel becomes a meditation on the brutal past of American frontier history, laying bare the acts of conquest required in advancing U.S. claims throughout the region. Comparing histories of southern slavery and western conquest, Patricia Limerick argues that the concept of the frontier has traditionally performed important cultural work, producing a kind of "western exceptionalism" which depicts the region as somehow standing apart from the rest of the United States as a unique development. For most Americans, Limerick argues, the legacy of slavery has been treated as a serious national concern, whereas the same has not been true for the legacy of western conquest:.

Southern historians successfully fought through the aura of moonlight and magnolias, and established slavery, emancipation, and black/white relations as major issues in American history....

Conquest took another route into national memory. In the popular imagination, the reality of conquest dissolved into stereotypes of noble savages and noble pioneers struggling quaintly in the wilderness.... In Western paintings, novels, movies, and television shows, these stereotypes were valued precisely because they offered an escape from modern troubles.... An element of regret for "what we did to the Indians" had entered the picture, but the dominant feature of conquest remained "adventure." Children happily played "cowboys and Indians" but stopped short of "masters and slaves.".

(18-19).

In Limerick's account, the frontier operates as a complex rhetorical strategy, a trope that produces exceptionalist ideologies while foreclosing critical debate about the violent past of western U.S. history.

By recasting discourses of the frontier in the novel, McCarthy revisits the literary history of the American empire, with the character Judge Holden becoming a pastiche of imperial figures such as Joseph Conrad's Kurtz and Herman Melville's Ahab. Described as a hairless, naked man of "immense and terrible flesh" (333) whose whiteness is allegorized by his status as an albino, the Judge recalls Marlon Brando's performance as the violent and depraved imperial agent in Apocalypse Now. Like Ahab, the character is obsessed with the logic that underpins expansion. The Judge functions as the embodiment of rational order, the philosopher who theorizes the mission, the historian who chronicles the events, and the poet who transforms it all into language. Blood Meridian becomes an important text in the tradition of the Western, then, primarily for the ways it restores the history of empire to the genre. Although John Cawelti pointed out years ago that the Western's closest analogue is the British imperial adventure narrative, scholarship that examines the genre's links to colonial ideologies has been lacking (Six-Gun Mystique 68). Richard Slotkin does trace the transition the genre experienced from its inception in the dime novel to its rebirth in pulp fiction. If the writers of the dime novel borrowed their conventions from another nation's colonial imagination, then the writers who transformed it into pulp fiction had to redefine the genre once again. "The tale of frontier adventure retained its popularity," Slotkin writes, "but it was now identified as 'the Western, distinguishing it from other types of borderland adventure, such as the 'Oriental or 'African adventure set on the new frontiers of imperialism" (194).

In perceiving how the Western borrows its faraway setting and redeeming male hero from the plots of colonial novels, critics can no longer argue that the genre operates as a quintessential American form but instead must recognize that its sensibilities have been shaped by a larger history of imperialism. Throughout Blood Meridian, the quest for the West and all it promises brings empire back home, forcing American readers to acknowledge the colonial unconscious shaping the genre and the imperial ideologies required to sustain these projects. The novel encourages us to rethink the problems posed by Westerns, arguably the most imperial of all American genres. McCarthy's analysis of the histories shaping the Western, in turn, redirects our attention to national identity and to the ways empire has always been central to the Anglo-American experience.

What is missing from the novel's reevalation of the West is the place of women in the narrative, an absence that runs throughout McCarthy's Westerns as well as his southern novels. The lack of fully developed female characters in his Westerns in some ways makes McCarthy well-suited to the genre's broader concerns, namely its obsession with Anglo-American masculinity. Jane Tompkins's West of Everything has done much to reveal the larger gender concerns structuring the Western. Tompkins's thesis that the genre as a masculinist form defines itself against the feminized narratives of the East encourages critics to reconsider the place of the female reader in the Western, especially in texts like Blood Meridian. Yet the main criticism launched against Tompkins--that her study reduces the complexities of the Western to one story (the "literary shoot-out at the gender corral")--is also well-taken.(FN4) If, as Tompkins readily admits, she had to erase all presence of Indians in order to frame the Western as an instance of a larger cultural battle between the sexes, then McCarthy may be said to have erased the presence of women in order to argue a case about the place of Anglo masculinity in nation-building projects.

The problems of subverting the codes and conventions of the Western thus become evident as early as Blood Meridian, as McCarthy's brutal satire on regional myths threatens to reinstate the very elements the novel seems to be dismantling. While critics often focus on the division in sentiment from his first Western to the Border Trilogy, what Barcley Owens describes as a shift from a "stark, unforgiving brutality" to a "primitive-pastoral vision" (xvi), McCarthy's use of parody in Blood Meridian raises its own concerns. By foregrounding the limits of Western revisionism, critics are able to acknowledge the problems of parody that become perhaps more evident in the Border Trilogy but appear already in Blood Meridian, McCarthy's first and more obviously satirical Western.

FRONTIER NOSTALGIA AND THE REVISIONIST WESTERN

Like Blood Meridian, McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (1992) revises and updates the Western, this time featuring a post-World War II landscape that is not typically its setting. Published during an era when the cinematic Western was undergoing a renewed cycle of popularity, All the Pretty Horses has become McCarthy's most successful novel to date, garnering him several honors, including the National Book Award. With its elegiac theme, the novel falls into the subgenre of the "end of the West" Western, a form that expresses a certain uneasiness toward the codes but that also laments the demise of the dream. It begins with an introduction to the character John Grady Cole, a young Texan cowboy who suffers from an anxiety of belatedness. The landscape John Grady has known all his life is rapidly becoming threatened by a cold-war military infrastructure and a burgeoning oil boom that promises to remap the Texas of his childhood. The cattle-ranching West that was his history is now passing away, the security of his boyhood likewise dismantled as he watches his world radically change.

All the Pretty Horses opens as John Grady mourns the death of his grandfather and the sale of his family's ranch, both signs of his West's demise. The sixteen-year-old protagonist tries to come to terms with the profound sense of loss that structures his life and the region as a whole. When he meets up with his estranged father at a café, they both reflect on these changes: "They stood in the tiled lobby while his father scanned the headlines. How can Shirley Temple be getting divorced? he said.... He looked at the boy. I know how you feel. I felt the same way. The boy nodded" (13). What is lost is the innocence associated with the young and the new, with the West and with figures like Shirley Temple. Just as the West--the nation's young region--is subjected to change, Shirley Temple, the child actress, grows up and does the unthinkable: she gets divorced. As a national symbol and an icon for American values, even Shirley Temple ceases to function as a reliable and stable entity but instead loses her innocence, much like the West, whose own possibilities are compromised as it undergoes irreversible transformations.

The novel centers on John Grady's growing realization that the cowboy way of life is over, that the American West can no longer serve as a venue for this national type. As readers eventually discover, however, the ranch that symbolizes the dream of the frontier for John Grady hasn't actually sustained a viable way of life for some time. Failing to cover expenses for the past twenty years, the ranch has not provided John Grady or his family any kind of dependable future. Instead of passively watching the demise of his dreams, John Grady and his companion Lacey Rawlins decide to leave behind the well-mapped geography of West Texas in exchange for the possibilities of Mexico, a place that offers them the chance of living out their cowboy fantasies:.

They reached the Devil's River by midmorning and watered the horses and stretched out in the shade of a stand of black-willow and looked at the map. It was an oilcompany roadmap that Rawlins had picked up at the cafe and he looked at it and he looked south toward the gap in the low hills. There were roads and rivers and towns on the American side of the map as far south as the Rio Grande and beyond that all was white.

It don't show nothin down there, does it? said Rawlins.

No.

You reckon it aint never been mapped?

(34).

Setting the first novel of the trilogy in the mid-twentieth century, an era when the Anglo West seemed all but exhausted, McCarthy writes of individuals who lament the loss of an older way of life.

Although John Grady possesses the qualities that make him a proper Western hero--he is skilled as a horseman, always acts the gentleman, and abides by his word--McCarthy takes care to show the ways John Grady is caught up in an impossible dream. His quest for the frontier, for instance, is presented as an ill-conceived dream. On the morning he sets off for Mexico, John Grady brings sandwiches from home, as if he were on a day's excursion or an impromptu picnic rather than a life-altering journey. Along the way, the two boys meet up with a young Mexican boy who is near their age. "You know that country down there? said Rawlins. The Mexican shook his head and spat. I never been to Mexico in my life," he responds (34). The encounter threatens to empty the quest of its meaning, as the region south of the border doesn't promise the same mythic possibilities for the Mexican that it does for John Grady and Rawlins. McCarthy later writes: "They sat under the shade of the willows and ate vienna sausages and crackers and drank koolaid made from creekwater. You think they got vienna sausages in Mexico? Rawlins said" (43). Searching for a space to live out their frontier dreams, the two boys' quest for a mythic place and time emerges as an ill-advised youthful fantasy.

During their journey to Mexico, the boys act out well-worn scripts of the frontier, "playing cowboy" on the trail but not always doing it well. They call each other "son" and "partner," as if they were imitating their fathers and uncles. At one point, McCarthy gives us a conversation that Rawlins initiates with John Grady: "I'm goin to tell you somethin.... I could get used to this life.... It wouldnt take me no time at all" (35). The dialogue they speak as they perform the roles of the Old West is trite. Rawlins, for instance, tells John Grady: "A goodlookin horse is like a goodlookin woman.... They're always more trouble than what they're worth. What a man needs is just one that will get the job done" (89). The comment sounds hackneyed even to John Grady, who responds, "Where'd you hear that at?" Rawlins answers, "I dont know" (89). When they meet up with Jimmy Blevins, who asks to accompany the boys on their quest, Rawlins replies: "Tell me just one thing.... What the hell would we want you with us for?" Blevins answers, "Cause I'm an American" (45). Although the pretend-cowboys scoff at his answer, all three boys trade in platitudes, speaking tired slogans that express outmoded ideas about masculinity, patriotism, and the Old West.

Throughout All the Pretty Horses, John Grady and Rawlins continue to playact, assuming the roles of outlaw and bandit in a Western performance that almost fools Blevins:.

... What do you want to do? I dont know. We could sell that horse in Mexico. Yeah. I aint diggin no grave like we done that last one. Hell, said John Grady, that was your idea. I was the one said just leave him for the buzzards. You want to flip to see whose gets to shoot him? Yeah. Go ahead.... It aint fair, said Rawlins. You shot the last three. Well go on then. You can owe me.... You all are just funnin, said the boy.... What makes you think you wouldnt be somebody good to start with? You all are just funnin. I knowed you was all along.

(40-41).

Playing cowboy means that John Grady must carefully abide by the hero's codes. His refusal to abandon Blevins--an incompetent and headstrong boy who loses his horse and most of his clothes in a lightning storm--eventually costs him greatly. John Grady, however, cannot disregard the code and abandon another man in need. While their dime-novel banter is deliberately overplayed and sensationalized, John Grady and Rawlins embody the parts so well that they eventually blur the line between game and reality.

McCarthy once reflected on the powerful workings of narrative, "The ugly fact is that books are made out of books.... The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written" (qtd. in Woodward 31). Just as John Grady and Rawlins depend on a tradition of popular Westerns and Hollywood films to act the part of the westerner, so McCarthy is dependent in All the Pretty Horses on previous western novels.(FN5) In this sense, we can read John Grady as a direct descendant of Wister's western hero in The Virginian. Figured as the classic cowboy updated for a post-World War II West, John Grady follows all the codes and conventions of the genre except that he doesn't get the girl or the ranch. Like Wister in The Virginian, McCarthy engages myths of the cowboy. John Grady's life at Don Hector's ranch in Mexico, for instance, provides him with ample opportunity to prove his abilities as a cowboy and a man. He and Rawlins take immediately to their setting, earning names for themselves as successful horse breakers and, in the case of John Grady, as the ideal lover of Alejandra, Don Hector's daughter. Yet as a cowboy, John Grady also contributes to the demise of this dream-space. A successful horse tamer, he becomes a symbol of the very order and civilization he is trying to leave behind; in particular, his actions compromise the mythic function of horses in the genre. As John Cawelti notes, horses typically figure as the cowboy's direct tie to the freedom of the West by enabling the hero not only to traverse the frontier but to dominate and control its spirit as well (Six-Gun Mystique 85). Early in the novel, McCarthy captures this sense of the horses' power in his description of John Grady: "What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise" (6). In breaking the wild horses on Don Hector's ranch, John Grady ends up sowing the seeds of his own destruction, bringing an end to the mythic landscape of his dreams.

The novel also shows an awareness of the limits of representation. When John Grady is home, he sees an oil painting of horses on the sideboard above him that has clearly been copied out of a book. John Grady realizes that "no such horse ever was that he had seen and he'd once asked his grandfather what kind of horses they were and his grandfather looked up from his plate at the painting as if he'd never seen it before and he said those are picturebook horses and went on eating" (16). Although the horses are clearly mispainted, operating as someone's fantasy of what the animals should be, John Grady is enthralled by this representation. The horses in the oil painting capture the fantasies that structure his life, as well as the myth that propels the development of western narratives as a whole.

In an odd way, however, when we meet John Grady in the final book of the trilogy, McCarthy seems to have been drawn in by the very myth his Westerns have been critiquing. In Cities of the Plain, for instance, McCarthy presents the cattle rancher Mac as an avuncular figure who takes quickly to John Grady, treating him not as a laborer but as his own son. Mac loans the boy money as easily as he gives him advice, creating a relationship that mirrors the one the Virginian forged with his employer in Wister's novel. By all historians' accounts, however, these fictional relationships couldn't be further from the reality of the ranch, where class hierarchies and exploitative labor relations reigned. While cowboy literature tends to provide romantic descriptions of roundups, brandings, and even stampedes, what remains absent, according to Zeese Papanikolas, is "work as a condition, as an economic necessity, as a psychology": "Strip a cowboy of his horse--he rarely owned it anyway--and what was he but one more seasonal worker, attached to the industrial world by railroads that led to Chicago stockyards and ranches owned as often as not by eastern bankers or Scottish investors" (75). Far from being the self-reliant, independent figures depicted in literature, most cowboys instead lived as marginal dependent workers: "Badly fed and badly paid, the cowboy was little higher in status than a tramp, wandering from ranch to ranch in search of a job or driving another man's beef to another man's railroad for salt pork, beans, and forty dollars a month" (75-76).

In All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy overlooks this history, creating in John Grady a doomed but noble hero whose fate is tied to the frontier and who becomes an object of nostalgia in his own right. At novel's end, he attends Abuela's funeral and then rides off again:.

In four days' riding he crossed the Pecos at Iraan Texas and rode up out of the river breaks where the pumpjacks in the Yates Field ranged against the skyline rose and dipped like mechanical birds. Like great primitive birds welded up out of iron by hearsay in a land perhaps where such birds once had been. At that time there were still indians camped on the western plains and late in the day he passed in his riding a scattered group of the wickiups propped upon that scoured and trembling waste. ... They had no curiosity about him at all. As if they knew all that they needed to know. They stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon that landscape solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish.

(301).

The conclusion provides us with the classic romantic ending of the Western, whose cowboy protagonist and heroic values are compromised by the advance of modern society, and whose Anglo hero replaces the Indian as the true sign of the "Vanishing American" (Slotkin 97). By transforming John Grady into a figure of longing, McCarthy sidesteps his earlier critique, presenting the boy as somehow the real victim of displacement. While it is clear that his actions along with the processes of white settlement bring about the end of the West, and that the dreams propelling the hero are childish ones, the novel nevertheless has it both ways, presenting the life as glorious and heroic, and its demise therefore lamentable.

THE ECOLOGICAL WESTERN

In The Crossing, the second novel in the Border Trilogy, McCarthy introduces new characters while developing a story that closely follows the events in All the Pretty Horses. Set in the 1930s and 1940s, a bit earlier than All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing features a similar conflict about the demise of the West. In this novel McCarthy presents the life of sixteen-year-old Billy Parham, who leaves home and travels across the border in search of the wild that eludes him on his family's New Mexico ranch. Of the novels in the trilogy, The Crossing comes closest to the sensibilities featured in Blood Meridian. Whereas All the Pretty Horses grappled with the seductions of the frontier, The Crossing is more interested in detailing the costs of the dream and, in the process, restoring an ecological vision to the Western.(FN6).

As in the first book of the trilogy, lessons of loss structure The Crossing, lessons the main character heeds in varying degrees. The she-wolf in the novel who terrorizes livestock in New Mexico crosses borders for entirely different reasons than the human characters do. Unlike the American Adams who seek to escape their pack, the she-wolf is motivated by the desire to reunite with her own. Carrying her first litter, she moved "out of the country not because the game was gone but because the wolves were and she needed them." Feasting on a veal calf she had pulled down in the snow, the she-wolf "ate till her belly dragged," McCarthy writes, "and she did not go back. She would not return to a kill. She would not cross a road or a rail line in daylight. She would not cross under a wire fence twice in the same place. These were the new protocols. Strictures that had not existed before" (25). Having lost the kind of safety she once had, the wolf knows better than to devote herself to old pathways and, in that sense, differs from the novel's other western characters, who are caught up in nostalgic efforts to stop their world from changing. McCarthy restructures the codes so that here the sense of loss is experienced by nonhuman nature in the form of a wolf who is also a fully developed character. It is the she-wolf, in other words, who is structured by elegy, rather than the Anglo hero.

The Crossing shows the cowboy's life as lonely and isolated. Billy Parham never manages to connect with other people in the text; when we meet up with him again at the end of the trilogy, he is still a detached and solitary figure with no family or friends to sustain him. McCarthy also reconfigures childhood in the novel, the corruptions of youth represented by the Indian boy who hides out on the family's land and serves as an embodiment of a wild world that initially attracts Billy. While the Indian boy may appear to be wild in Billy's eye, he is not a "pure" or "uncontaminated" figure but is shaped by the encroachments of Anglo culture. Billy "had not known that you could see yourself in others' eyes nor see therein such things as suns. He stood twinned in those dark wells with hair so pale, so thin and strange, the selfsame child. As if it were some cognate child to him that had been lost who now stood windowed away in another world where the red sun sank eternally" (6). Wearing a tattered blanket coat, a greasy, worn Stetson, and boots mended with wire, the boy asks Billy,.

What are you all doin out here? Gettin wood. You got anything to eat? No. Where you live at? The boy hesitated. I asked you where you lived at. He gestured downriver. How far? I dont know. You little son of a bitch.... The indian spat. Spooked everthing in the country, aint you? he said.

(6-7).

As the cowboy's double, the Indian symbolizes the dangers of the wild and the unknown for which Billy yearns, as well as representing a disheartening sign that these elements may somehow already be gone. In portraying the Indian character in this fashion, McCarthy introduces problems that his novel does not fully resolve, problems that plague the Western itself as a genre. His depiction of the Indian as somehow fallen and corrupted, a figure who embodies the wild, replays the dualisms through which white writers have often portrayed Native characters--namely as savage red men or noble figures. By rendering the Indian as a mirror for the white character, a stand-in of sorts for his desires and dilemmas, the novel also replays a move western writers have often made vis-à-vis Native characters. That is, it features Indians as signs or symbols for white concerns, rather than as fully developed characters in their own right.(FN7).

Throughout the novel, the wild that Billy seeks is presented as an elusive and fleeting element, something less tangible than the Indian he encounters. McCarthy establishes this sense of the wild by beginning the story with Billy fully engulfed in the landscape of New Mexico:.

When they came south out of Grant County Boyd Billy's younger brother was not much more than a baby and the newly formed county they'd named Hidalgo was itself little older than the child.... The new country was rich and wild. You could ride clear to Mexico and not strike a crossfence. He carried Boyd before him in the bow of the saddle and named to him features of the landscape and birds and animals in both spanish and english.

(3).

Naming the country around him, Billy becomes Adam in the garden, living in a state of wonder that is temporarily outside the encroachments of history. As the region starts to fill in with other white settlers, however, his early connections with the wild are destroyed. When he leaves home early in the book to track the wolf that he wants to return to the wild, his position as the Adamic American begins to unravel. During his journeys, Billy is frequently cautioned about his life as a wandering westerner. Arnulfo, the Mexican rancher, for instance, warns him about the wolf, about his yearnings for the wild: "You want to catch this wolf.... Maybe you want the skin so you can get some money. Maybe you can buy some boots or something like that.... But where is the wolf? The wolf is like the copo de nieve.... You catch the snowflake but when you look in your hand you dont have it no more" (46). Billy doesn't heed this advice, or any of the warnings he receives from the figures he meets along the way. He disregards, for instance, the words of the old man who wears jade and silver jewelry and tells him that he must "cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because ... by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself" (134). When Billy finally does return home, his decision comes too late. He learns that his parents have been murdered and that his father's horses are gone. After retrieving his brother Boyd, he returns to Mexico, this time on a quest inspired by an outmoded cowboy code regarding stolen horses.

As the younger brother, Boyd, his name a reminder of the youthfulness that shapes his actions throughout the text, desperately wants to catch up to Billy. For instance, he refuses to show his tears to Billy when he returns, hiding instead behind false bravado. When the older brother asks, "Are you ready to go?" he replies, "Just waitin on you" (171). Later, when Billy goes back to pay the guard who loaned them money, Boyd gives him change, which Billy counts before handing it over to the man.

I know how to count, Boyd said.

What?

I know how to count. There wasnt no need for you to count it a second time.

Billy turned and looked at him and turned back again.

All right, he said. I wont do it again.

(178).

In a hurry to grow up, Boyd plays the brave cowboy, constantly trying to save face and hide his weaknesses. Ironically, though, for all his uneasy attempts to live the life, Boyd ends up becoming the western hero that Billy will never be. Although he loses his life in the process, Boyd is immortalized by the corridos (border songs) that present him as a folk hero and mythical figure. Billy understands that his younger brother was not all the things the stories make him out to be yet nevertheless engages in his own mythmaking: "We come down here to get our horses. Me and my brother. I dont think he even cared about the horses, but I was too dumb to see it. I didnt know nothin about him. I thought I did. I think he knew a lot more about me" (387).

While his reconfiguration of the characters and their motivations in The Crossing moves beyond what he provides in All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy ultimately capitulates to the codes. His portrait of Anglo views of Mexico illustrates this point. An enigmatic, unknowable entity, McCarthy's Mexico is "wholly alien and wholly strange" (74). When Billy and Boyd ride into the border town in search of the horses, the movement across national dividing lines immediately alienates the boys from themselves and their surroundings: "Billy was watching the reflections of two riders passing in the glass of the building's window across the street where the gaunted horses slouched by segments through the wonky panes when he saw the illjoined dog appear also and realized that the rider at the head of this unprepossessing parade was he himself" (195-96). In unsettling the westerner, alienating him from himself, Mexico becomes a region where the hero from north of the border loses his bearings and his sense of identity. A racialized geography, the space is continually mystified in the novel, with Billy telling Boyd at one point that there "aint no law in Mexico. It's just a pack of rogues" (176). Likewise, the Mexican characters in the text are figured in the same way as the wolf and the Indian boy; they too represent the wild, the inscrutable, the unknowable. Although McCarthy expresses ambivalence about featuring Mexico as an American dream-space (his Mexican characters criticize the Anglo for figuring the country as an arena or extension of the U.S. frontier), he gets to have it both ways by failing to imagine how else Mexico might operate.

Richard Slotkin addresses the function of the border in cinematic Westerns in ways that speak to McCarthy's literary depiction in The Crossing. For Slotkin, the geography of the frontier is filmically represented as a world divided by "significant and signifying borders" (351). It is typically understood as a border between an "'old world which is known, oppressive, and limiting" and a "'new world ... rich in potential and mystery, liberating and full of opportunity" (351). In this way, Mexico functions as the ultimate refuge for outlaws, renegades, and western heroes in need of moral regeneration (413, 417). Mexico becomes "mythic space par excellence," operating outside the frame of history so that when Americans are featured riding south of the border, they are in effect riding out of American history as the Western typically understands it (311). Daniel Cooper Alarcón argues along these lines, addressing the production of "Mexicanness" in Anglo-American writing. Presented as the meeting place between the Old and New Worlds, a timeless and ahistorical region, Mexico is often portrayed as a symbolic backdrop against which various spiritual quests are played out, with its inhabitants frozen in time (40). An inscrutable and bewildering topography in Anglo literature, Mexico becomes a place where merciful death awaits the foreign traveler (41-42). At one point, Billy encounters a rider who looks out across the landscape and tells him, "I dont understand this country.... Not the first thing about it" (415). After he returns to collect Boyd's bones, Billy tells another character, "This is my third trip. It's the only time I was ever down here that I got what I come after. But it sure as hell wasnt what I wanted" (416). While McCarthy may be critical of this vision, he reinstates it somewhat by reifying the border, making Mexico the strange Other to the Anglo North.

If McCarthy has difficulty getting outside the codes in The Crossing, Billy likewise struggles to wake up from the dream. Billy is haunted by dreams, by visions that seem to foretell his future, and by illusions about the wild, the West, and the frontier. As a cautionary tale about trying to assert control over the unknown, the novel addresses the limits of human power over the wild. By the end of the book, Billy's dreams become nightmares, as he loses everything he once had. The Crossing is ultimately a melancholy text that begins with fantasies of the region's promise but ends by revealing them to be illusions. Billy forsakes the code of the hero; instead of being the solitary figure who lives outside the social, he becomes devoted to his younger brother, realizing finally how much he needs Boyd, family, and other people to keep him sane. When Billy loses Boyd, he begins to see his life in a different way: "For the enmity of the world was newly plain to him that day and cold and inameliorate as it must be to all who have no longer cause except themselves to stand against it" (331). After Boyd's death, Bill is at last emptied of his illusions; the West is no longer a world of romance and intrigue but is now a bleaker and more despairing place. Yet even as he wants out of the dream, Billy finds he is left with no place to go and no real purpose. He tries to join the army but is turned away because of a heart murmur. Forced to give up the dream, he gains insight into his situation but is left literally with a broken heart. The palm reader confirms this idea; she says that although he'll live a long life, it will be a life with much sadness (369).

The ending of the novel, with Billy shooing away the dog only to call it back desperately, fulfills the palm reader's forecast. McCarthy's description of the dog is telling: "It had perhaps once been a hunting dog, perhaps left for dead in the mountains or by some highwayside. Repository of ten thousand indignities and the harbinger of God knew what" (424). Although Billy sought the wild of the wolf at the beginning of the story, by the end of the novel he is more aligned with the mongrel dog whose experiences with the domestic world and the wild are both writ across his body. Abandoned and mistreated, the miserable animal finds his counterpart in the equally distraught cowboy. Billy's quest thus works against the tradition of the Western, with its code of the hero and his desire for the wild. His dilemma shows instead the underside of the dream, which, when taken to its logical conclusion, turns out to be a dangerous and deadly desire: "After a while he sat in the road.... he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction" (426). Billy pays the price for his western dreams, with the western sun, indifferent to his sufferings, refusing to bestow its glory on him. Critics have addressed the sun and its unusual appearance at the end of The Crossing as a reference to the Trinity explosion, an ominous sign of things to come (Luce 212). While this reading provides a powerful revision of the cliché of the setting sun and the demise of the cowboy, the ending nevertheless appears to mourn the ending of cowboy life and ultimately fails to show what might replace the myth of the Anglo West.

BROKEN COWBOYS, BROKEN DREAMS

Cities of the Plain, the final installment of the Border Trilogy, again highlights frontier nostalgia for its shortcomings but gets to have it both ways by retaining aspects of the frontier myth. Cities of the Plain interrogates the racial and masculinist tropes of traditional Westerns but, like The Crossing, is unable to generate something beyond its scope. The title of the concluding volume addresses this larger project, referring readers to the lamentable fate of Lot's wife, who looked back with longing on "the cities of the plain" in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis, a longing McCarthy perhaps knows all too well through his own attempts to rewrite the Western. The trilogy itself features characters who are likewise brought down by a similar desire, the yearning for experiences that are no longer available. These desires structure John Grady's travels to Mexico in All the Pretty Horses as he searches for a freedom he believes is no longer available to him in the U.S., Billy Parham's attempts to uphold an outmoded code about stolen horses in The Crossing, and the failure of both John Grady and Billy to overcome their cowboy fantasies in Cities of the Plain.

John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are young teenagers in All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing; when we meet with them again in Cities of the Plain they are older in years but in some ways little wiser for the living. Facing a dying way of life, nineteen-year-old John Grady asks the twenty-eight-year-old Billy Parham, "What would you do if you couldnt be a cowboy?" Billy brushes off the thought, saying he'd "think of somethin." Billy turns the question on John Grady and then answers it himself. "You'd go to veterinary school if you had the money I reckon. Wouldnt you?" (217). The point is that while both characters can imagine leading a different life, neither one of them acts on this knowledge. The dream of the West holds sway over them to such an extent that even as they can foresee its end, they find themselves hardly able to imagine a life outside that dream. The character Eduardo, the silk-clad Mexican pimp--himself an unfortunate cliché of Hollywood proportions--also criticizes the escapist fantasies of American cowboys: "They drift down out of your leprous paradise seeking a thing now extinct among them. A thing for which perhaps they no longer even have a name" (249). Later he explains: "That is what has brought you here and what will always bring you here. Your kind cannot bear that the world be ordinary" (253). Eduardo lays bare John Grady's desires for the wild and for Magdalena, the young epileptic prostitute from Chiapas, and, in doing so, indicates the ways John Grady's yearnings for her are tied up with his desires for a mythic Mexico itself.

Cities of the Plain spans several decades, showing Americans still consuming the dream beyond the millennium. The end of the novel presents us with the seventy-eight-year-old Billy, now a destitute cowboy whose last paying job involved working as an extra in Westerns as part of Hollywood's own dream machine. The epilogue of the novel, with its dream-within-a-dream sequence, features Billy continuing to struggle to make sense of the role dreams play in his life, the ways western mythology still determines his life choices. The novel concludes with the homeless cowboy taken in by a ranch family and the rancher's wife, Betty, listening to his story: "She patted his hand. Gnarled, ropescarred, speckled from the sun and the years of it. The ropy veins that bound them to his heart. There was map enough for men to read. There's God's plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world" (291). Billy tells her, "I'm not what you think I am. I aint nothin. I dont know why you put up with me." She replies, "Well, Mr Parham, I know who you are. And I do know why. You go to sleep now. I'll see you in the morning" (292). The poignancy of her response captures two understandings of Billy. On the one hand, we have the map of his existence--the years of hard physical labor done outdoors and the life of solitude he has led. On the other, we have the dream dismantled, with Billy perhaps realizing how the myth has structured his life. Billy's hand lays bare the map of his life--who he is and why anyone would put up with him--while at the same time presenting us with Billy's attempt to move beyond the dream, his struggle to achieve a more mature understanding of his life and to convince others of the dangers of the myth.

In the final book of the trilogy, McCarthy returns us to the world of the filmic Western, a realm that has often featured older, aging figures and their struggles to confront changes in the West (Mitchell 3). In doing so, he builds on the codes of the "adult Western" with its theme of the broken cowboy. Like Billy in Cities of the Plain, in the historical West, unemployed cowboys and Indians often did work as extras in movies; Slotkin points out that before 1903, famous lawmen and desperadoes, after their release from prison, frequently cashed in on their celebrity by performing in Wild West shows, just as outlaws such as Frank James and Cole Younger had done (235). As the most popular and successful entertainment enterprise in the U.S. from 1883 to 1916, the Wild West shows finally became outdated with the advent of motion pictures, which then took the lead in featuring participants who were integral in the "making of history" in the West (66-68). In the Western, the ultimate insult for the down-and-out hero was to end up in Hollywood movies as a cowboy extra, playing out on-screen the myth that helped create his misery in the first place; the account of the exreal cowboy who comes to Hollywood to play his own mythicized self on-screen has become, in turn, a staple of revisionist Westerns since Nathanael West's Day of the Locust (Fiedler, Return 147). That Billy becomes an anachronistic cowboy in the last volume of the trilogy may be appropriate for a genre that has itself often been considered a "charming anachronism" (French 47). The strange twist here is that with the closing of the Border Trilogy, McCarthy himself offers contemporary readers a cowboy novel based on a screenplay that he somehow couldn't sell to Hollywood back in the 1980s (Woodward 40).

BECOMING (ANTI)WESTERN

Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr. has commented on how southern writers have begun moving West, "imaginatively forsaking Dixie" for the possibilities and promises offered by another region (2). This movement, he argues, "fundamentally challenges the generally accepted parameters of what we designate as 'Southern and more generally as 'regional fiction" (3). What most fascinates Brinkmeyer as a scholar of southern literature is how genre classification is being reconfigured by this new mobility. Focusing on a wide range of authors, from Cormac McCarthy to Barbara Kingsolver, from James Dickey to Rick Bass, and from Dorothy Allison to Richard Ford, Brinkmeyer notes the ways southern writers are redefining and reworking the cultural myths shaping the Western, the genre that more than any other helped define the West in the national imaginary. At the same time, he concedes that some critics have viewed contemporary southern writers in the West as "romantic escapists," whose flight "westward into fantasy" is a flight away from the problems currently shaping the South (32). As Brinkmeyer points out, however, rather than operating as a "geography of hope" (borrowing a term from Wallace Stegner), the West as depicted by recent southern writers functions more as a "geography of terror" (40).

In McCarthy, the problem is less about flight per se than obsession. In many ways, his dilemma as a western writer in the Border Trilogy mirrors the problem facing his main characters, John Grady and Billy Parham, neither of whom can escape their compulsion to act out the mythos of the West. Like his two characters who keep traveling the same ground, McCarthy revisits scenes he examined earlier in Blood Meridian. While his first Western is usually thought to have helped propel the genre in new directions, opening up the form to new visions, it is similar to the Border Trilogy in having it both ways, offering a critique that nevertheless enables more western myths to follow. McCarthy's novels foreground a problem long shaping the Western, what Robinson describes as a pattern of address and withdrawal, an inability to take the concerns posed by the genre to their logical conclusions (2-3). Ultimately, McCarthy's attraction to the codes of the Western confirms the genre as a divided and self-subverting form and explains precisely why the anti-Western is both necessary and difficult to achieve.

Added material.

SUSAN KOLLIN.

Montana State University.

I would like to thank Dan Flory, Alex Hunt, Greg Keeler, Judy Keeler, Michael Sexson, and the anonymous readers at Contemporary Literature for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

FOOTNOTES

1. For more on McCarthy as a writer of multiple regions, see Brinkmeyer; Cawelti, "Cormac McCarthy"; and Pilkington.

2. In Love and Death in the American Novel (1966), Leslie Fiedler defined the anti-Western as an "assault upon the Western and its image of America" (409). Later, in Return of the Vanishing American (1968), he argued that anti-Westerns are a phenomenon of "popular Westerns" rather than "serious Westerns," producing a distinction that does not bear up well under recent theories of the popular. He then used the term "metawestern" at the Western Literature Association meeting in 1972 to speak of texts that parody the formula. For more on Fiedler's talk, see Etulain 82-84.

3. Recent scholarship on the genre emphasizes that the Western is not a monolithic form but one that accommodates diverse and contradictory stories. See, for instance, Buscombe and Pearson; Cameron and Pye; Kitses and Rickman; Mitchell; and Robinson.

4. See Pye for a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Tompkins's argument.

5. For a discussion of the books Blood Meridian was "made out of," see Phillips.

6. French recognized the "ecological Western" as an emerging subgenre (91).

7. For discussions of the symbolic uses of Indians in cinema, see the essays in Rollins and O'Connor.

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