Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion

Addressing the genre of Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 All the Pretty Horses, James Lilley writes that despite telling the story of its protagonist John Grady Cole’s journey from home and coming of age, the novel “is a Western, not a Bildungsroman” (274). “Whereas the Bildungsroman is driven forward by a quest for novelty,” Lilley writes, “Westerns are necessarily retrospective, repetitive and elegiac, driven by a desire to repeat and relive the established patterns and plots of the past” (274). Cole, whose story begins with his grandfather’s funeral in 1949 (6), and who travels not west but south across the Mexican border in search of something missing in his modern Texas of cars and oil derricks, “does not want to extricate himself from the past—establishing a new beginning, divorced of all precedent, on the frontier; rather, his journey down into Mexico becomes an elegy to the Old West, an attempt to move backwards in time to a place where the codes of the Old West are still valorized” (Lilley 274). Leaving aside the question of whether he conflates all Westerns with the particular sub-genre of belated Westerns that flourished during the mid-twentieth-century period in which All the Pretty Horses is set, Lilley’s curious distinction between the Western and narratives of new beginnings on the frontier is symptomatic of another implicit conflation, in this case of the Western with genre fiction as such.¹ Arguing that John Grady returns to Texas at the end of the novel “fully aware that life, like the Western, is driven by repetition,” Lilley sees Grady as exemplifying McCarthy’s commitment to the sort of “freedom within the ultimately empty and determined symbols of language” described by Lacan (283). This reading of genre, with its stress on narrative and other forms of repetition, analogizes at another level the difference within repetition that for Lacan characterizes language itself: “In the same way that [McCarthy’s] characters realize a paradoxical freedom within the determinism of their landscape, so too we as readers—similarly subjected to the determinism of plot and language—find an impressive, qualitative ‘dynamic space’ within the confines of the text” (284).

This account of genre as reinforcing the novel’s representation of human agency seems at odds, however, with Lilley’s suggestion elsewhere in the essay that the novel’s generic attributes exist not in McCarthy’s prose but in the mind of his protagonist. Thus, Lilley describes Grady as “determined to live his own Western, complete with strict chivalric codes, daring rescues, and, much to the chagrin of many critics, love at first sight” (275), and argues that “perhaps we should not be surprised that McCarthy’s description of [Grady’s] love affair with [the Mexican heiress] Alejandra is so remarkably flat and unoriginal; John Grady must see her in this way for his own narrative, the Western, to work” (285n6). John Grady no doubt carries his preconceptions with him, but pushing the novel’s generic expectations off onto him, and crediting them with deadening effects on the novel’s language, seems to undercut Lilley’s account of McCarthy’s commitment to “freedom within . . . determinism,” insofar as it makes Grady into a naïve exponent of genre clichés whose creator—like Mark Twain vis-à-vis Huckleberry Finn—presumably knows better.

Lilley’s equivocation at these moments, I want to argue, reflects the widespread and persistent prejudice against genre fiction central to what Mark McGurl has dubbed the program era of post-World War II fiction. Committed, in its paradoxical character as “an institutionalization of anti-institutionality” (McGurl 221), to a modernist ideal of individual authorial genius, the writing program pushes anxieties about its own Taylorized character onto “the machine-made quality of formulaic genre fiction” (26). Under these circumstances, it can at most—turning its critique back upon the “institutional respectability that had put a glaze upon the great experimental works of the interwar modernist era”—produce works of “meta-genre fiction,” in which “a popular genre—romance, western, science fiction, fantasy and detective fiction—is both instantiated and ironized to the point of...