-
2. "Pledged in Blood”: Truth and Redemption in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses
- Texas A&M University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
“ ” | 41 Pledged in Blood” Truth and Redemption in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses Even when the romanticizing of the past, as well as the present cultural identity, is exposed as a self-serving illusion . . . the mythic element that permeates the popular consciousness may not easily be exorcised as useless trivia since it has come to assume a life of its own in the group’s imagination. A s many critics have noted, it is no coincidence that the action of All the Pretty Horses takes place exactly one hundred years after that of Blood Meridian. In many ways, Pretty Horses is the offspring of that book, an elegy for a romanticized way of life, a code of honor, a mythical world both birthed and brutally murdered in Blood Meridian. In Pretty Horses, we see the modern embodiment of the ancient myth of the sacred hunter—the sacred cowboy. The figure of the hunter engaged in holy communion with nature has, by the end of Blood Meridian, been replaced with that of the cowboy digging postholes,preparing to string barbed wire across the tamed body of the wilderness so that he may populate with cattle that which he so mercilessly emptied of buffalo. The figure of the cowboy personifies America’s most cherished myths, combining ideas of American exceptionalism,Manifest Destiny,rugged individualism,frontier democracy, communion with and conquest of the natural world, and the righteous triumph of the white race. In All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy brutally deconstructs the fantasy narratives needed to uphold these mythic icons. The figure of the sacred cowboy is one of our most potent National Fantasies , visible in everything from ads for blue jeans to car commercials to popular films. I will argue, however, that this mythic figure, like that of the “ 42 | hunter that preceded it, is bound to crumble, for it is hollow at its core and stripped bare by McCarthy in All the Pretty Horses.As John Grady Cole slowly begins to recognize the fragility and falseness of his life, he seeks a return to the imagined innocence of the sacred cowboy of the mythic past, only to discover no such return is possible. John Grady’s quest signifies the gap in the National Symbolic the fantasy of the cowboy on the open range has been unable to cover. Unlike the random trajectory of Blood Meridian’s kid,however,John Grady’s quest is made poignant for American readers by the fact that the imagined version of the cowboy code of conduct so wholeheartedly and unquestioningly accepted by John Grady at the start of the novel is at once admirable and utterly untenable , full of contradiction and hypocrisy. As American readers, we cannot help but respond to the evocation of that myth through such a sympathetic and likeable character.This is,perhaps,one reason All the Pretty Horses has so often been labeled McCarthy’s most “accessible” work of fiction and is his first novel to appear on the NewYorkTimes bestseller list.Indeed,Vereen Bell notes it is probable that“this novel has already sold more copies than all of McCarthy’s previous novels combined” (“Between the Wish,” ). The life John Grady has been living on his family’s Texas ranch is a romantic fantasy, familiar to every American through innumerable novels, films, grade-school history texts, beer commercials, and cigarette advertisements . It is nonetheless a mask, a rose-colored cliché of the National Symbolic barely hiding the falseness at its core. That this particular myth strides about on feet of clay is made apparent, not just through the immanent sale of the ranch, but through the persistent return of all that this version of National Fantasy attempts to deny and repress: the truth of its conception so brutally revealed in Blood Meridian. As I noted in the introduction, belief in this mythic narrative and the innocent vision it presents of America, American history, and American identity requires fierce and careful denial of both the imperial theft of land that allowed for Anglo settlement and the inherentracismandclassismnecessarytomaintainandjustifythesocialorder born of that history.Through the all-American character of John Grady,with his innocence and romanticism coupled with stubborn, self-serving blindness , McCarthy lovingly evokes that myth and at the same time strips away the layers of fantasy that make belief in it possible. The violent past thrusts itself into the present in Pretty Horses almost immediately ,as the novel opens with John Grady leaving the funeral of his cowboy...