Cormac McCarthy: New Directions

“Blood is Blood”: All The Pretty Horses in the Multicultural Literature Class

C ritics have examined Cormac McCarthy’s novels from several perspectives, yielding particularly rich results in studying the historical antecedents and philosophical underpinnings of his work or contemplating his indebtedness to Faulkner, Melville, O’Connor, the Bible, and a host of other writers and texts. In addition, scholars are broadening the field of McCarthy studies, examining his work in the light of recent theoretical developments. McCarthy even has an entire web site and an online journal devoted to the discussion of his works. All of this is to say that critics have read McCarthy’s works through a variety of lenses, but no one has yet considered him in the context of multiculturalism. Indeed, at first glance, Cormac McCarthy might seem like an odd choice as a subject for an essay on teaching an American multicultural literature class. After all, in the popular conception of the term, McCarthy is not even “multicultural.”As a white male of Anglo-Irish extraction, he is not “ethnic” (i.e., Asian, Indian, African American, or Latino) in a way that most people would consider as “multicultural.” Such narrow conceptions of multiculturalism reveal a type of essentialist thinking that is problematic, to say the least. For 153 “Blood is Blood” All The Pretty Horses in the Multicultural Literature Class Timothy P. Caron 154 : Timothy P. Caron instance, as my own American multicultural literature students often wonder, do only people of color have an ethnicity? In other words, is there such a thing as “white” ethnicity? Although McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is not a self-conscious exploration of its author’s ethnicity in the same way that Beloved, for example, is an expression and exploration of Toni Morrison’s African American ethnicity, McCarthy’s novel can be tremendously effective in a multicultural literature classroom . Specifically, the trials and tribulations of McCarthy’s Texan hero, John Grady Cole, can serve as a sobering reminder to students of the peculiar peril—and promise—of encountering the cultural Other. In this essay, I explore the role McCarthy’s novel played in my recent teaching of a course called “Contemporary Multicultural American Literature.” All the Pretty Horses provided an excellent opportunity for the class to explore the dangers inherent within a border contact between two cultures and served as a paradigm for both teacher and students in what to do and not to do as we tried to fashion ourselves into what Gloria Anzaldúa calls atravesados—border-crossers. The Campus, the Class, and Southern California Demographics I first included McCarthy on a multicultural literature syllabus while I was teaching American literature at Biola University, a small, private, Christian, liberal-arts university in Los Angeles County whose student population is largely white.1 Despite being located within what is arguably the most ethnically and culturally diverse metropolitan area in the United States, our campus is both ethnically and ideologically homogenous. This homogeneity results from the type of student that the university recruits—generally, middle- to uppermiddle class Anglos from evangelical backgrounds. For instance, because the school does not actively recruit potential students from Catholic backgrounds, the percentage of Latino/a students will always necessarily be underrepresented on a campus situated in the heart of southern California. Likewise, the African American population is underrepresented because the school’s faith strictures exclude students from the Holiness and Pentecostal movements. 155 : “Blood Is Blood” Having just participated in a five-week NEH Summer Institute on multicultural American literature a few months before teaching this class, I was anxious to employ many of the curricular and pedagogical insights I had garnered over the summer.2 However, I was seriously concerned if anyone would be interested in such a class at the university. After all, 70 percent of the total undergraduate population is white (Asian Americans constitute 13.75 percent of the student population, Latinos/as 7.37 percent, and African Americans 3.63 percent). The percentage of minority students who are also English majors is probably even lower than these campuswide statistics. In a class of sixteen (and one very white professor recently transplanted from Louisiana), only three minority students were enrolled: a young Afro-Caribbean woman and two Latinos. After consulting, primarily through the Internet, with colleagues from around the country who teach at a variety of colleges and universities,3 I began to realize just how distinctive my overwhelmingly Anglo class composition was with respect to the typical...