In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • All the Pretty Language:Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses as Metafictional Künstlerroman
  • Andrew Harnish (bio)

On the surface, Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses does not appear to be a complex work. It seems to be a coming-of-age story about a couple of young cowboys, albeit one enlivened by McCarthy's breathtakingly lyrical prose. It is a popular novel, accessible—and, as James Lilley notes, the qualities that give it its mass appeal repel some critics, in particular its depiction of "love at first sight" (275) and the tropes of the more traditional Western (Scott 248).

But as Sarah Gleeson-White suggests in her article "Playing Cowboys: Genre, Myth and Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses," McCarthy is not engaging with the genre unselfconsciously; as she points out, rather than merely perpetuating the stereotypes of the old West, "the way in which McCarthy makes his Western reveals the complicity of industrial popular culture in the practice of cultural myth-making" (25). Gleeson-White goes on to assert that throughout the novel John Grady and Blevins act out the roles of cowboys (32–33) and engage in "aching nostalgia" (26), in dialog with "the popular culture from which [Western] myths have been expanded upon and disseminated" (34). These moves complicate the novel's status as a Western. And the self-conscious deployment of Western tropes is not the only way All the Pretty Horses traffics in and comments on artifice: There is metafiction in its depiction of John Grady Cole's coming of age, too.

For most critics, the narrative centrality of John Grady's maturation positions the novel squarely as a Bildungsroman. Gail Morrison argues that All the Pretty Horses "is fundamentally a Bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story in the great tradition of Hawthorne, Twain, Melville and James" (178). Her article is subtitled "John Grady Cole's Expulsion from Paradise"—this indicates the presence of yet another layer of [End Page 26] archetype; not just the "American naïf" Morrison first outlines in the piece, but the prelapsarian innocent "who experiences the evil of the universe and risks defeat by it" (178). Reinforcing this Manichean interpretation, Irving Malin tells us that while "on one level" the novel seems an "adolescent picaresque…on a second (and deeper) level it is an occult narrative of the ultimate meanings—if there are any—of these adventures. There are echoes of a religious quest, a trip to discover the Holy Grail" (29). Malin's assessment of All the Pretty Horses emphasizes the spiritual elements of John Grady's coming of age—indeed, he calls it one of "the great religious novels written by any American" (29). But whereas Morrison and Malin affirm the novel's status as coming-of-age narrative, John Blair complicates its status as Bildungsroman.

Blair terms the narrative "bildungsroman-ish," because, in his view, John Grady's journey ultimately has no meaning at all (305). Blair goes on to argue that at the start of the novel "John Grady's vision does not need deepening; what he needs is the opportunity to employ a vision that, even at sixteen, is already quite clear" (303). As Blair sees it, John Grady rides out of Texas and crosses the border into Mexico searching "for a very particular kind of meaning: a historical sense, a sense of consistent and clear-cut attitudes and values" (302), values which mirror John Grady's own "codified and personal sense of conduct, knowing right, sensing authenticity….and resisting authority when it is arbitrary or unjust" (305). But in Blair's view, by novel's end "John Grady seems to come to realize that the journey, though it must be taken, is in the end as futile as anything else he might have done, because no place is different, essentially, than where you yourself came from, because you yourself cannot be any different than who you are" (305).

Blair's nuanced interpretation acknowledges both the clarity of John Grady's sense of purpose setting out on his journey and the confusion and frustration he faces upon confronting the failure of its conclusion: attempting to return Blevins's horse to its...

pdf