Table Of ContentA CORMAC MCCARTHY
COMPANION
This page intentionally left blank
A CORMAC MCCARTHY
COMPANION
The Border Trilogy
Edited by
Edwin X Arnold and
Dianne Q Luce
University Press of Mississippi
Jackson
www.upress.state.ms.us
Copyright © 2001 by University Press of Mississippi
The following articles were first published in The Southern
Quarterly and are used by permission: "Autotextuality, or Dialogic
Imagination in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy" by Christine
Chollier; " 'Go to sleep': Dreams and Visions in the Border
Trilogy" by Edwin T. Arnold; " 'Wars and rumors of wars' in
Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy" by John Wegner; " 'As of
some site where life had not succeeded': Sorrow, Allegory, and
Pastoralism in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy" by George
Guillemin; "The World on Fire: Ethics and Evolution in Cormac
McCarthy's Border Trilogy" by Jacqueline Scoones; "The
Vanishing World of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy" by
Dianne C. Luce; "Cowboy Codes in Cormac McCarthy's Border
Trilogy" by Phillip A. Snyder; "Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Will
Be Gone: The Circuit of Male Desire in Cormac McCarthy's
Border Trilogy" by Nell Sullivan; all copyright © 2000 by The
Southern Quarterly.
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 4321
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A Cormac McCarthy companion : the Border trilogy / edited by
Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57806-400-7 (cloth : alk. paper)—
ISBN 1-57806-401-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)
i. McCarthy, Cormac, 1933- Border trilogy. 2. Mexican-
American Border Region—In literature. 3. Western
stories—History and criticism. I. Arnold, Edwin T. II. Luce,
Dianne C.
PS3563.C337 66733 *°°*
8i3'.54—dc2i 2001026170
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
CONTENTS
Introduction vii
Autotextuality, or Dialogic Imagination
in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy 3
Christine Chollier
"Go to sleep":
Dreams and Visions in the Border Trilogy 37
Edwin T. Arnold
"Wars and rumors of wars" in
Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy 73
John Wegner
"As of some site where life had not succeeded":
Sorrow, Allegory, and Pastoralism in
Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy 92
George GuilJemin
The World on Fire:
Ethics and Evolution in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy 131
Jacqueline Scoones
v
vi Contents
The Vanishing World of
Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy 161
Dianne C. Luce
Cowboy Codes in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy 198
Phillip A. Snider
Boys Will Be Boys and Girls Will Be Gone:
The Circuit of Male Desire in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy 228
Nell Sullivan
Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic
in McCarthy's Border Trilogy 256
J. Douglas Canfield
Notes on Contributors 271
Index 273
INTRODUCTION
This volume is intended as a companion to our earlier collection of
essays, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy (1993, rev. ed. 1999). In that book,
we brought together studies of all of McCarthy's major writings, with the
exception of his play The Stonemason. Now we have chosen to concentrate
on a specific, unified body of work—AH the Pretty Horses (1992), The Cross-
ing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998)—the three novels that comprise
McCarthy's Border Trilogy. McCarthy spent some fifteen years writing this
story. If one also included his first western, Blood Meridian (1984), which
might rightfully be seen as prologue to the trilogy, then almost half of his
writing career has been devoted to these western novels. Many would con-
sider them his best work, although that issue will no doubt continue to be
debated.
As we now know, the Border Trilogy had its genesis in a screenplay enti-
tled "Cities of the Plain" that McCarthy wrote in the early 19805 (see Ar-
nold's "The Last of the Trilogy: First Thoughts on Cities of the Plain" in
Perspectives 221-47). In tnat version, the characters of John Grady and Billy
(with no last names) anticipate their later manifestations in the novels,
although the Billy we find in the screenplay is a secondary figure and the
emphasis is on John Grady's story. After unsuccessful attempts to place the
screenplay, McCarthy recast the material in novel form, although it is un-
clear just when he decided to use the material in fiction. It may always have
vn
viii Introduction
been his intention, or the decision may have evolved later, as it became
clear that a film of "Cities" would not be made.
According to Gary Fisketjon, McCarthy's editor at Knopf, McCarthy at
first planned to write only two books, both on John Grady, one elaborating
his background and the second covering the events in the screenplay. At
some point these two books turned into three, as Billy began to emerge as a
more significant figure. Thus, reserving the narrative in the screenplay for
his final volume, McCarthy wrote AH the Pretty Horses, devoted to John
Grady Cole, and then turned to Billy Parham in The Crossing, before bring-
ing them both together in Cities of the Plain. The ending of the trilogy, then,
was always waiting for the other two books to arrive. John Grady's death and
Billy's grief make up the inevitable conclusion towards which all events in
the preceding novels converge.
The idea of "trilogy" is an intriguing one, and in recent years some nota-
ble American writers have explored the possibilities of the form. Toni Mor-
rison, for example, has identified Beloved (1987), Jazz (i993)» and Paradise
(1999) as three interrelated books: although they are connected neither by
recurring characters nor specific events, they hold together in their histori-
cal examination of the African-American experience from slavery to con-
temporary times and in their exploration of varieties of destructive love. On
the other hand, Peter Matthiessen's "Everglades Trilogy," composed of Kill-
ing Mister VKitson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997), and Bone by Bone (2000),
recounts the events, both actual and imagined, leading to the murder of
Edgar J. Watson from three different approaches, including Watson's own
first person narrative. Madison Smartt Bell is presently completing his own
trilogy detailing the i8th century slave revolt in Haiti led by Toussaint Lou-
verture; the first two volumes, AH Souls' Rising (1996) and Master of the
Crossroads (2000) have already appeared. Expanding the form, over the last
two decades, Louise Erdrich has created a growing, interconnected clan
chronicle in such books as Love Medicine (1984), Tracks (1988), and The
Bingo Palace (1994), while other writers like John Updike and Phillip Roth
have returned again and again to fictional representatives such as Harry
Angstrom and Nathan Zuckerman in multiple works. Although we have not
tried to compare McCarthy's trilogy with these roughly contemporaneous
novel sequences, or with earlier notable American trilogies such as John
Introduction ix
Dos Passos's l/.S.A. or William Faulkner's Snopes Trilogy, it is clear that he
is working within a revitalized tradition.
At the time of its original publication, Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy,
a revised version of our 1992 special McCarthy issue of The Southern Quar-
terly, was the first collection devoted to McCarthy's writings, preceded only
by Vereen Bell's groundbreaking work, The Achievement of Cormac McCarthy
(1988). By the time our revised edition of Perspectives, which included new
essays on The Crossing and Cities of the Plain, came out in the spring of
1999, other studies and anthologies had remarkably expanded the scholarly
examination of McCarthy. Sacred Violence: A Reader's Companion to Cormac
McCarthy, edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach, appeared in 1995; Robert
L. Jarrett's Twayne monograph Cormac McCarthy followed in 1997. Later,
in Fall 1999, the journal Southwestern American Literature published an issue
focused primarily on McCarthy's western writings, guest-edited by Wallach.
The beginning of the new century has so far witnessed further examples
of McCarthy scholarship. In the Spring of 2000 The Southern Quarterly pub'
lished our second special McCarthy issue, which forms the foundation of
this collection. Next, Barcley Owens's study Cormac McCarthy's Western
Novels was published by University of Arizona Press (2000), and Wallach
recently brought out a comprehensive collection of essays, both original and
previously published, on all of McCarthy's work under the title Myth, Leg-
end, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy (Manchester University
Press, 2000).
As should be clear, McCarthy scholarship has so far been dominated by
articles and essays, many of them quite brief in scope (the majority of the
articles in the Wallach anthologies were selected from presentations given
at the annual meetings of the Connac McCarthy Society, from its genesis
in 1992 to the near present). Meanwhile, dissertations on McCarthy con-
tinue to be written both in the United States and abroad, and we should
expect to see more of them turned into books and monographs, such as
Owens's. But at this point the need for in-depth studies of McCarthy's writ'
ing, both southern and western, remains great. The lengthy and complex
essays in this collection point the way for the kind of work we feel McCar-
thy's novels deserve, a mid-point, perhaps, between conference proceedings
and the kind of full-length explorations we anticipate in the future.
In this collection we have brought together diverse readings of the tril-
