In Rough Country (15 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
There was an old horseskull in the brush and [John Grady Cole] squatted and picked it up and turned it in his hands. Frail and brittle. Bleached paper white. He squatted in the long light holding itâ¦
What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his rev
erence 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.
With this statement the novelist would seem to bare his own ardent heart, making vulnerable what in practitioners of literary irony is kept well hidden.
In a telling scene in
Cities of the Plain
, John Grady Cole on his way to town with “hair all slicked back like a muskrat” pauses for a conversation with an old ranch hand to whom he speaks with a touchingly filial courtesy. The old man tells John Grady a tale of barroom violence in Juarez, Mexico, in 1929.
â¦Tales of the old west, he said.
Yessir.
Lots of people shot and killed.
Why were they?
Mr. Johnson passed the tips of his fingers across his jaw. Well, he said. I think these people mostly come from Tennessee and Kentucky. Edgefield district in South Carolina. Southern Missouri. They were mountain people. They come from mountain people in the old country. They always would shoot you. It wasn't just here. They kept comin west and about the time they got here was about the time Sam Colt invented the sixshooter and it was the first time these people could afford a gun you could carry around in your belt. That's all there ever was to it. It had nothin to do with the country at all. The west.
Nothing to do, in other words, with the “degeneracy of mankind” but only with the brainless predilection for violence in a specific historic/sociological context.
Through the more than one thousand pages of the
Border Trilogy
the essential conflict is between two distinct ways of life: the way of the wanderer-on-horseback and the way of settled, circumscribed life. The yearning to leave home and “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” (in Huckleberry Finn's memorable final words) is perhaps the most powerful of yearnings in McCarthy's novels, far more convincing, for instance, than John Grady Cole's romantic infatuations with Mexican girls. Though for most Americans the vast, empty spaces of rural Texas and New Mexico would seem roomy enough, for the boy-heroes of McCarthy's fiction Mexico is the region of exotic adventure and mystery: “where the antique world clung to the stones and to the spores of living things and dwelt in the blood of man.” The slickly villainous Mexican pimp Eduardo of
Cities of the Plain
gives the yearning a cruder interpretation:
[Americans] 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. Being farmboys of course the first place they think to look of course is a whorehouse.
In fact there is nothing salacious nor even sexual in the interlocked tales of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham. Even as John Grady becomes a lover he remains in essence chastely stoic as the hero of a traditional boy's adventure story.
Initially, both John Grady and Billy, of Texas and New
Mexico respectively, are drawn to crossing the Mexican border on horseback as a means of escaping the increasingly somber facts of their lives (with the death of John Grady's grandfather, the family ranch will be sold and he must leave; both Billy Parham's parents are murdered) and of proving themselves as men. Though minutely grounded in the verisimilitude of ranch life and the
gravitas
of the physical world, which no one has more powerfully evoked than Cormac McCarthy, each novel attempts to link its boy-heroes with ballad or fairy-tale elements that some readers may find implausible, if not preposterous. The best way of appreciating McCarthy's achievement in the
Border Trilogy
is simply to suspend disbelief when the novels swerve into their mythic mode. For example, the first part of
The Crossing
, a tenderly observed love story of a kind between the teenaged Billy Parham and a pregnant female wolf he has trapped, and leads across the Mexican border with the intention of releasing her in the mountains, is an extraordinary piece of imaginative prose, like the novel's final pages in which Billy encounters a terribly crippled stray dog. Here is Billy's homage to the mysterious and beautiful predator he has had to kill, to end her suffering:
He squatted over the wolf and touched her fur. He touched the cold and perfect teeth. The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlightâ¦Deer and hare and dove and ground-vole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight,
all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate fromâ¦He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of a great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh.
John Grady's “ardent heart” for horses is equally convincing, but far less convincing is the boy's predilection for falling disastrously in love with Mexican girls (highborn in
All the Pretty Horses
, an abused prostitute in
Cities of the Plain
) whom he naively wishes to marry. Not much of this is credible and virtually none of it is original, but the doomed boy-girl romance of
All the Pretty Horses
helped to make the novel McCarthy's breakthrough best seller. In the more skillfully composed
Cities of the Plain
, in essence a reprise of
All the Pretty Horses
in a darker tone, John Grady's second love affair, with a teenaged prostitute both abused and saintly in the way of a Dostoyevskian girl of the streets, leads to their death in a brilliantly choreographed knife-fight sequence with Eduardo, stylized and ritualistic as a Japanese Noh play. Before he is killed by the American boy he hasn't taken altogether seriously, Eduardo pronounces this cultural judgment:
In his dying perhaps the suitor will see that it was his hunger for mysteries that has undone him. Whores. Superstition. Finally death. For that is what has brought you here. That is what you were seekingâ¦
Your kind cannot bear that the world be ordinary. That it
contain nothing save what stands before one. But the Mexican world is a world of adornment only and underneath it is very plain indeed. While your worldâhe passed the knife back and forth like a shuttle through a loomâyour world totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions.
In McCarthy's later fiction such seemingly allegorical figures begin to intrude, as if the author had become impatient with the conventions of realism, like the later, pointedly didactic Tolstoy in his “moral fables” telling us what he wants us to think in an elevated vatic language. Dialogue gives way to rambling monologues, sermons, and homilies in the second half of
The Crossing
, as Billy Parham encounters strangers on his pilgrimage, each with a story to tell him. After the dramatic conclusion of
Cities of the Plain
, the author adds an anticlimactic epilogue in which a garrulous stranger appears to tell the now seventy-eight-year-old Billy Parham what life is all about.
This story like all stories has its beginning in a question. And those stories which speak to us with the greatest resonance have a way of turning upon the teller and erasing him and his motives from all memory. So the question of who is telling the story is very consiguiente.
It's as if the novelist were providing a gloss on his novel, or his notes to himself during its composition.
So long as McCarthy trusts to John Grady Cole and Billy Parham to embody truths they cannot perhaps articulate, the
Border
novels are works of surpassing emotional power and
beauty; elegies to a vanishing, or vanished frontier world, in the decades following World War II. “The world will never be the same,” the adolescent Billy is told by an older horseman in
The Crossing
, to which Billy replies, “I know it. It ain't now.” By the end of the trilogy Billy has become an elderly homeless man, long since horseless and friendless, taken in by a family out of pity and given “a shed room off the kitchen that was much like the room he'd slept in as a boy.”
As if we were forced to see Huckleberry Finn in his later years, a homeless drifter broken in body and spirit, for whom the romance of “setting off for the Territory” is long past.
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A partial inventory of the macho artillery employed in McCarthy's ninth novel
No Country for Old Men
includes: a short-barreled Uzi with a twenty-five round clip; an AK-47 automatic; a short-barreled H & K machine pistol with a black nylon shoulderstrap; a short-barreled shotgun with a pistol stock and a twenty-round drum magazine; a Tec-9 with two extra magazines; a nickel-plated government .45 automatic pistol; a heavy-barreled .270 on a '98 Mauser action with a laminated stock of maple and walnut and a Unert1 telescopic sight; a stainless steel .357 revolver; a nine-millimeter Glock; a twelve-gauge Remington automatic with a plastic military stock and a parkerized finish fitted with a shop-made silencer “fully a foot long and big around as a beercan.” Too many to count are undesignated pistols and shotguns, some of them short-barreled. There is a cattle gun acquired by a psychopath killer and put to cruel use:
[Chigurh] placed his hand on the man's head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing. The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see.
Llewelyn Moss, a former Vietnam War sniper, a Texan on the run from the psychopath, employs some of the weaponry in this arsenal but is “a strong believer in the shotgun.” The sheriff of Comanche County, an older man named Bell, prefers old-fashioned police-issue Coltsâ“If that don't stop him you'd better throw the thing down and take off runnin'”âand the old Winchester model 97â“I like it that it's got a hammer.” Men are judged by their prowess with firearms but also by the boots they choose to wear: “Nocona” for Moss; “expensive Lucchese crocodile” for a self-described hit man named Wells in the hire of a wealthy Houston businessman/drug smuggler; ostrich-skin boots for the psychopath Chigurh.
Not the Texas frontier of legend but contemporary rural Texas in the vicinity of Sanderson, near the Mexican border, is the setting for this fast-plotted action novel about heroin smugglers and the considerable collateral damage among the innocent and not-so-innocent in their wake. The novel takes its title from William Butler Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium”: “That is no country for old men. The young/In one another's arms, birds in the trees/âThose dying generationsâat their song⦔ Yeats's country is Ireland, seemingly suffused with erotic en
ergy; McCarthy's country is suffused with the malevolent Eros of male violence. Not horses or wolves but firearms and their effect upon human flesh is the object of desire in
No Country for Old Men
, which reads like a prose film by Quentin Tarrantino. With the exception of Sheriff Bell, the moral conscience of the novel, characters are sketchily and perfunctorily drawn as if on the run. At the center of the action is a psychopath who shoots his way through scenes invincible as a Terminator-like instrument of destruction and given to vatic utterances: “When I came into your life your life was over.”
Shorn of the brooding lyricism and poetic descriptive passages that have become McCarthy's signature style,
No Country for Old Men
is a variant of one of the oldest of formula suspense tales: a man discovers a treasure, unwisely decides to take it and run, bringing upon himself and others a string of calamities ending with his death. Alfred Hitchcock coined the term “MacGuffin” to signify the arbitrary object of pursuit: someone has something (an icon, a secret formula, any variety of treasure) that others want, generating chase scenes, killings, suspense in Hitchcock's ingeniously contrived films. In
No Country for Old Men
the MacGuffin is drug moneyâ“Two point four million. All used bills”âdiscovered by Moss in the aftermath of an apparent shoot-out by rival drug smugglers in the wilds north of the Mexican border, where Moss is hunting antelope. In addition to the money, Moss also takes some Mexican brown heroin and several firearms which in the course of his doomed adventure will be put to frequent use.
Thirty-six, married to a much younger woman, a naive
risk taker who puts both himself and his wife in jeopardy, Moss doesn't exist as much more than a function of the plot, a kind of puppet jerked about by the author. Since the predominant mode of narration in
No Country for Old Men
is detached, as in a screenplay, a documentation of physical actions, we follow Moss and his nemesis Chigurh, cutting from one to the other as in an action film, without being privy to their motives. (After several readings, I still can't understand why, having stolen the drug money and escaped safely, Moss decides to revisit the scene of the carnage to help the only surviving, badly wounded Mexican, rather than anonymously summon professional help for the man. Except to get himself sighted and pursued by drug dealers, and precipitate the plot, this isn't a very sensible decision.)
In essence,
No Country for Old Men
is a showcase for McCarthy's psychopath killer Anton Chigurh and the mayhem he perpetrates upon mostly unarmed and helpless individuals. There is no sexuality in McCarthy's fiction but only a minutely described, ecstatically evoked Eros of physical violence, repeatedly evoked in prose. As his almost exact contemporary John Updike has written with ecstatic tenderness of physical heterosexual love, so McCarthy writes of physical violence with an attentiveness found in no other serious writer except Sade: