Cormac McCarthy: New Directions

Introduction: “There Was Map Enough for Men to Read”: Storytelling, the Border Trilogy, and New Directions

I wish I could tell you that this essay collection was inspired by the closing words of Cormac McCarthy’s most recent novel, Cities of the Plain. “The story’s told,” insists the dedication of the final installment of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy: “Turn the page” (293). These words remind the reader that from the feral Appalachian wilderness of his first four novels—The Orchard Keeper (1965), Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), and Suttree (1979)—to the austere southwestern borderlands of his most recent fiction—Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998)—the intertextual matrix of Cormac McCarthy’s work is held together by an unending faith in the power of storytelling. Earlier in Cities of the Plain, the two protagonists of the Border Trilogy, Billy Parham and John Grady Cole, participate in a hunt for wild dogs. In the frieze of violence that ensues, gesture is more important than discourse. “Goddamn” is all that Billy can manage after “the slack of [his] catchrope hissed along the ground and stopped and the big yellow dog rose suddenly from the ground in headlong flight taut between the two ropes and the ropes resonated a single brief dull note 1 I N T R O D U C T I O N “There Was Map Enough for Men to Read” Storytelling, the Border Trilogy, and New Directions James D. Lilley 2 : James D. Lilley and then the dog exploded” (167). The dance of the dog hunt, with its “dull” report of exploding heads and singing ropes, guides us back toward the central image of the Border Trilogy—the puppets dancing on a string that Alfonsa, the strong-willed great-aunt of John Grady Cole’s Mexican lover Alejandra, offers in All the Pretty Horses as a reading of Mexican history. “For me,” Alfonsa admits, “the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on” (231). Here we observe the existential backdrop to McCarthy’s landscape, the nexus of puppet and string that ties the tapestry of existence together. The central question of McCarthy’s fiction has always centered on the possibility of agency—“whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay” (Blood Meridian 5)—and in McCarthy’s world this possibility is actualized only through a further perpetuation of the dance, a witnessing and retelling of the story, a reweaving of the world. “That man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry,” insists Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden, “will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate” (199). For McCarthy, storytelling is the definitive human activity. Through the story we engage ourselves in the tapestry of creation, single out and witness our own thread in this fabric, and merge our voice with the “desert absolute” for a fleeting, and often violent, moment in history (Blood Meridian 295). In Whales and Men—a screenplay that McCarthy uses to rehearse the major thematic issues that he will tackle in the Border Trilogy—the Irish aristocrat Peter Gregory writes the following comments in his ship’s log: “We have no faith in being because we have fractured it into history. And this is the way we live. In archives of our own devising. Among sketches and bones. . . . There is no book where the world is written down. The world is that book” (96).1 McCarthy’s representations of the Appalachian South and the borderlands of the U.S. Southwest are not fractured 3 : Introduction archives of “sketches and bones.” Rather, they are a work in progress, a living and fluid dialog, that exists only at those storied moments of intersection between speaker and witness, traveler and desert absolute. And McCarthy suggests that our agency, our “faith in being,” can be realized only to the extent that we accept the roles of storyteller and witness. Otherwise we are left like puppets and dogs on a string, dancing to a...