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Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion

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,