Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion

Andrew P. Hoberek

79 citations0/0 files storedAmerican Literary History

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Modern American Literature Studies American Literature and Culture Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Abstract

Addressing the genre of Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 All the Pretty Horses, James Lilley writes that despite telling the story of its protagonist John Grady Cole’s journey from home and coming of age, the novel “is a Western, not a Bildungsroman” (274). “Whereas the Bildungsroman is driven forward by a quest for novelty,” Lilley writes, “Westerns are necessarily retrospective, repetitive and elegiac, driven by a desire to repeat and relive the established patterns and plots of the past” (274). Cole, whose story begins with his grandfather’s funeral in 1949 (6), and who travels not west but south across the Mexican border in search of something missing in his modern Texas of cars and oil derricks, “does not want to extricate himself from the past—establishing a new beginning, divorced of all precedent, on the frontier; rather, his journey down into Mexico becomes an elegy to the Old West, an attempt to move backwards in time to a place where the codes of the Old West are still valorized” (Lilley 274). Leaving aside the question of whether he conflates all Westerns with the particular sub-genre of belated Westerns that flourished during the mid-twentieth-century period in which All the Pretty Horses is set, Lilley’s curious distinction between the Western and narratives of new beginnings on the frontier is symptomatic of another implicit conflation, in this case of the Western with genre fiction as such. Arguing that John Grady returns to Texas at the end of the novel “fully aware that life, like the Western, is driven by repetition,” Lilley sees Grady as exemplifying McCarthy’s commitment to the sort of “freedom within the ultimately empty and determined symbols of language” described by Lacan (283). This reading of genre, with its stress on narrative and other forms of repetition,

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 79 citations exist upstream.

References

2009The program era: postwar fiction and the rise of creative writing 1985Blood meridian, or, The evening redness in the West 1996Fight Club 1999Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy 2000Myth, legend, dust : critical responses to Cormac McCarthy 2009“Maps of the World in Its Becoming”: Post-Apocalyptic Naming in Cormac McCarthy'sThe Road

Cited by

2016Affect and American literature in the age of neoliberalism 2012The Rise of the Academic Novel 2013The Cambridge Companion to Cormac McCarthy 2013Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and “a world to come”2013Histories, Novels, Ideas:2013History and the Problem of Evil in McCarthy’s Western Novels 2014The New Naturalism: Cormac McCarthy, Frank Norris, and the Question of Postmodernism 2013McCarthy, Tennessee, and the Southern Gothic

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.