Is paradise eternal? Is reaching paradise even possible? How long can you remain exposed in pure sunlight before the shadows cast behind you catch up and overtake you? You can ask John Grady Cole, the protagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.
The story starts out in the same kind of bleak Texas landscape where Peter Bogdanovich set films like Hud and The Last Picture Show. John Grady hopes to inherit his family’s ranch even though it is in rapid decline. His dysfunctional family has other ideas and he ends up on his own in a small town located in southwestern Texas. He sets off on horseback with Rawlins, his cousin and childhood companion. They head off for the border of Mexico and as they ride, the two teens realize that someone is following them. The follower, named Jimmy Blevins, catches up to the two and insists on joining them. He is a shadow encroaching on their sunlight. Rawlins is suspicious of his intentions and wants him to leave, but John Grady agrees just as long as he doesn’t cause any trouble. That initial encounter sets the tone for the rest of the novel.
Jimmy Blevins remains a mysterious character throughout the whole story. His identity and age are never certain. His background story can’t be verified. A couple things are obvious, one being that he has a high quality, expensive horse and gun while the other is that he has some desert survival skills that are unusual for a kid of his age. That horse and gun are the pivot on which the fate of all three teenagers depends.
As the trio cross the Rio Grande into Mexico and ride farther into the Sonoran desert, the landscape takes on a life of its own. The descriptions of the dusty brown soil, the vegetation, the vast sky, the arroyos, and the calm silence bracketed by gusts of wind is like a description of the Elysian Fields. McCarthy’s descriptions evoke a desert plain that is pulsing with life. The language he uses is lush and densely textured so that sentences unfold like blossoms of velvet. This is by far the best, and I might say the only, good descriptive writing I have encountered in McCarthy’s works to date. In a strange way, the transition from Texas to Mexico reminded me of The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens her bedroom door, leaves her dreary life in Kansas behind, and enters into a land that is both colorful and magical.
And this landscape is a perfect setting for adventure. The three continue into the foreign land with no other immediate goal beyond survival. They hunt for food, they search for water, and they continue south for a good long time. Most importantly, they succeed in surviving with little more than their horses and their wits. Their development as characters also comes out as they move on. John Grady remains the silent introspective one along with being the leader and decision maker. Blevins is equal parts clever and naive. Rawlins is the talker who never stops expressing doubts about Blevins; he takes every chance he can to convince John Grady to abandon the boy, but John Grady insists they have a responsibility to take care of him until they get someplace where he will be safe.
After Blevins’ horse and gun get stolen during a rainstorm, the three boys find them in a dusty village. They lose Blevins when he tries to retrieve his horse by stealing it. Meanwhile, John Grady and Rawlins continue heading south until they reach an hacienda where they find employment training horses in preparation for the market.
On the hacienda, John Grady proves to be a master of horsemanship as he far exceeds the abilities of the ranch hands when it comes to breaking wild horses. He quickly gets promoted to the top position and then falls in love with Alejandra, the hacendado’s daughter. This is when the shadows begin to gather and come for John Grady. Their love is forbidden by both Alejandra’s father and her aunt. The latter actually has a high opinion of John Grady, but since Mexico is such a class-stratified society, she worries about protecting her niece’s reputation and commands him to stop seeing her. This doesn’t stop Alejandra from sneaking out at night to be with him.
Something has been going on in the background. Lawmen have been consulting with Alejandra’s father and soon they arrive to haul him and Rawlins away to a prison where they meet up with Jimmy Blevins who had been arrested after he killed a man while trying to steal back his gun. First John Grady and Rawlins are relieved of Blevins’ company, and then they are taken to a brutal penitentiary where every day is a fight for survival. Before somebody on the outside mysteriously arranges for their release, John Grady kills a man in self defense.
Up until this point, aside from the brilliant descriptiveness, what is great about this novel is the way John Grady reaches such a high point in his life as if he is on the verge of entering paradise, riding the crest of a wave that is high beyond belief, and then the wave breaks and he is smashed down into the darkest pits of Hell. But in the middle of all this, John Grady remains stoic, steadfast, and unemotional. Ironically, his emotional content is carried externally in the prose throughout whatever setting he is in. The desert is euphoric and adventurous. That euphoria carries over into the hacienda where his dreams appear to be in reach. Remember that his ambition in Texas was to take over his family’s ranch and then he lands at the hacienda which seems like second best. Then that euphoria is completely eclipsed by the grit and danger of the penitentiary. The writing is saturated with deeply felt emotions even though John Grady barely expresses almost nothing more than a desire to continue on. This contrast between emotion and non-emotion is what gives McCarthy’s prose so much depth.
After being released from prison, Rawlins takes a bus back to America while John Grady ties up some loose ends and settles his scores. This involves last encounters with Alejandra and her aunt, getting revenge on the policeman who sent him to jail, and, most importantly, collecting the three horses that he, Rawlins, and Belvins rode through the desert of Mexico. After dealing with this business, John Grady returns to Texas where two significant things happen.
First John Grady gets taken to civil court in order to prove he did not steal his horses. This is complicated by the fact that he has no official papers of ownership, but the avuncular Judge takes a liking to him, finds him not guilty, and later they have a discussion in the Judge’s home where John Grady tries to make sense of everything he went through in Mexico. The Judge advises him not to worry because everything bad that happened there was not his fault. As a teenager, he might have made the wrong decisions in some ambiguous situations, but he was a victim of circumstances without any grounds for moral condemnation. Of course, the Judge has to pass judgment on John Grady to make that judgment authoritative, bringing gravitas and closure to the life trial he had gone through.
Secondly, John Grady goes in search of Jimmy Blevins’s family to return his horse and tell them the bad news about their son. Unable to locate them, he ends up at the home of a radio preacher named Jimmy Blevins where he is treated to a huge meal cooked by his wife and offered a new vision of domestic bliss. At this point I couldn’t help recalling The Wizard of Oz again. Like Dorothy, John Grady leaves his dismal home, travels into a land of exotic beauty, gets plunged into the depths of Hell, and learns there is no place like home. All the while he is at the mercy of good and evil forces that are beyond his control, just as Dorothy is pushed and pulled along by the Wicked Witch of the West and the Good Witch of the East. Could those witches correspond to Alejandra’s father and aunt, the former trying to destroy John Grady and the latter trying to save him and send him hone? As exciting and magical as Mexico could be for him, it just wasn’t where he belonged just like Dorothy didn’t belong in Oz. But unlike Dorothy, John Grady doesn’t find a home in the end. What he does find is a better sense of what a good home could be. The novel ends with him hitting the road on horseback in search of it once again. He doesn’t get to Heaven, but he does find himself traveling in Purgatory.
So what are the horses about? John Grady is closer to horses than anybody else in the novel. He understands them. He communicates with them. He trusts them and all the affection he gives them is reciprocated. He connects with the horses on a deep level that is uncanny and borders on the mystical. To understand the horses though I think you need to contrast what happens in the presence and absence of them. When John Grady is in their presence, he is riding south in the Mexican, desert, he is working on the hacienda and having a romance with Alejandra, he is returning to America, and he is wandering on horseback at the end searching for something that remains a mystery to the reader. When the horses are absent, John Grady is in the Mexican prison system or else he is seeing Alejandra for the last time before she leaves him for good. He regains control over his life by gaining control over the three horses that Rawlins, Blevins, and himself rode into Mexico on. It is also significant that the three go their separate ways when Blevins’ horse gets stolen. When John Grady is in the presence of his horses, he is in control of his life; when the horses are absent, he is in misery and his life is falling apart. My interpretation is that the horses represent the cornerstone of John Grady’s existence and you might even say they represent his soul. Another possibility is that the horses are a MacGuffin, meaning a thing or person that is central to the plot but otherwise has no inherent symbolic meaning to the narrative.
Another element of interest I find is the presence and absence of modern technology. John Grady thrives in the absence of technology. The times when he is thriving most and living with maximal freedom is when he is either riding in the desert with his companions or spending time with Alejandra. The only modern technology around at most of those times is his gun. Otherwise, the places with the most technology are the towns, the hacienda, and the prison which are all places where the most severe conflicts arise or else are just necessary stopping points for taking care of business along the route of his journey. There is no reason to think McCarthy is making a deliberate statement about technology. I actually believe that this is a narrative technique he uses to draw a sharp contrast between the best and worst times of John Grady’s travels.
I also find the contrast between the presence and absence of technology creates a sense of timelessness in the narrative. Throughout most of the book it is difficult to tell when it takes place. (If you read carefully, you can deduce it is in the year of 1949 since early on Rawlins gives his age as 17 and when he enters prison he tells the intake officer he was born in 1932) It has the ambiance and feeling of a traditional western story, but there are infrequent intrusions of things like cars and radios. This suspension of definite time markers and the dependence on the cycles of sunrises and sunsets infuses the narrative with a dreamlike feeling of other worldliness. The passages with modern technology in the background deflate that feeling and bring the narrative down to the ground. This is why I say the language McCarthy writes with is richly layered.
In the end, this book was a big surprise. I thought Blood Meridian was poorly written and downright boring. The Road was one of the worst novels I’ve ever read being nothing more than a thin trickle of literary diarrhea. All the Pretty Horses is certainly a more mature and well-developed work of art, worth reading for the use of language and literary technique alone. The trajectory of the story makes it even more complete and approaches the universal in its themes. As a western novel it is one that clearly transcends its genre. Most westerns don’t actually mean anything. They just involve gunfights between good guys and bad guys. But transcendence means the story entails something more thoughtful than violence for the sake of entertainment. My final thought is that this novel addresses boundaries and what happens when they get crossed. National boundaries are arbitrary and some might even say imaginary. Social boundaries including those of class, ethnicity, culture, and language may be less imaginary, but they are not impermeable. Crossing boundaries entails expanding and enhancing our understanding of the world by experience whatever is outside our knowledge. But crossing boundaries also entails risk. However dangerous that risk might be, it is one worth taking because, in most cases, no matter what it is we go through, be it bad or good, we grow and come out stronger in the end. If we don't cross boundaries we never grow. If we don't grow we have no chance of coming closer to what it is we can truly be.
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