The West in All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses paints an image of a dying West: a West that is no longer what it used to be. It is through this changed, more modernized western landscape that McCarthy explores the idealized tropes of the western hero, the cowboy and the romantic vision of the lifestyle of western settlement. It is also through this unromantic view of the land and space that McCarthy is able to create John Grady Cole’s character to be a failed version of the stereotypical western hero. John Grady strives continuously to live in the way of the West that had been popular during his grandfather’s era. But, just as the old West is passing away, John Grady’s grandfather’s ranch is passed along to the highest bidder, representing the loss of a possibility at an idyllic Western ranching lifestyle.

In All the Pretty Horses, the West in America is not “Western” enough for John Grady’s ideals, and so he chooses to go to Mexico, in hopes that he can achieve his desires there. John Grady fails to achieve anything but fleeting success and romance through out the book, thus proving him to be a failed western hero, unable to accomplish what true western men easily achieve. He is also unable to maintain the cowboy code of justice and honor, shown when he tries to return the horse to it’s rightful owner, but cannot find said owner at all. Though John Grady’s stoic, “man-of-few-words” persona lasts through the entirety of the novel, he ultimately rides off, “into the darkening land, the world to come” as a man with no true place that he owns and belongs to (302). He is uprooted, a wanderer, still searching for an ideal that cannot be achieved. It is in this way that McCarthy examines how the cowboy stereotype shifts and ultimately fails within a new, more modern West.

Solitary Nature of the Cowboy Figure

We were talking in class the other day about the ways in which the traditional Western archetypes might apply to Tropic of Orange and both Gabriel and Bobby were mentioned as possibilities for the “cowboy” figure. I was thinking which of those two male characters would fit in more with men like John Grady or Art Croft and I felt myself leaning towards Gabriel, mostly because his narrative arc establishes him as something of a “wanderer.” However, after some thinking, I settled upon another reason: Gabriel, unlike Bobby, ends up alone at the end of the novel with the death of Emi. Is romantic loss and loneliness a necessary attribute for the character archetype of the cowboy? We see in All the Pretty Horses John Grady’s rejection by Alejandra and subsequent wandering alone through the desert. In The Ox-Bow Incident, similarly, Gil returns to town only to find that he has lost Rose to another man. His behavior afterwards reflects that of the traditional cowboy: he drinks, he fights, and he rides. Could a cowboy maintain a successful romantic relationship and still be called a cowboy? Or is the wandering lifestyle necessary to be a cowboy simply not conducive for the success of such a relationship? I think why I find this interesting is that characters like John Grady or Gil seem to desire successful relationships with women given their emotional turmoil when these relationships fail. The inability of romantic relationships to coexist with the cowboy lifestyle drives a lot of what makes cowboy characters interesting.

Django and the Legacy of the Western?

So i need one final post and i dont want to backtrack and do a previous book because it's really just my own fault i didnt do them sooner. As it happens, however, i watched Tarantino's "Django Unchained" over the weekend and i thought i would put what i've learned in this class to the test and see if what, if any, Django owes or adds to the Western tradition as I've come to understand it this semester. The first thing i noticed was the music and font of the opening credits, Tarantino uses the traditional, hokie saloon font and the Bonanza style song complete with "whip crack" sound effect to immediately tie his story to the traditional John Wayne, Ox-Beau western. Despite his "dialogue" on slavery, this movie is not as forward thinking as Tarantino would have us believe. Instead its much more a stereotype and cliche western, more at home with our early readings. When i saw the giant tooth on the German's dentist wagon i thought for a moment it might be referencing McTeague somehow and perhaps pointing at a deeper understanding of the West, but alas, the wagon is blown up with dynamite and that particular icon goes no further. Like our early readings Tarantino's West is defined by its trappings. Django becomes a cowboy the moment he puts on that dead slaver's hat. His transformation is immediate and heroic in the way only a movie montage can be. But in this moment Tarantino engages the myth of the West by rising Django to that mythical western status. He is a deadeye with a rifle and pistol, a superb horseman, and a consummate badass seemingly without justification. Tarantino even seems to wink at us when the German acknowledges this, likening Django's story to that of a German folk legend. The concern for Justice with a capital J likewise is a western ideal, that Justice is something one can know inherently and which is beyond the laws of man.

Overall there is not much that Django brings to the western genre. Tarantino shows his appreciation for the genre through his fond use of the traditional tropes and cliches, but does not expand with his own interpretation. As a western, Django is straight forward and predictable. Not so much a modern take, as a nostalgic nod.

Defining Space in the West in Tropic of Orange

This semester we have wrestled with the idea of defining space in the West. Until now the West has still been something raw; there has been an untamed element for man to conquer and that made man good somehow. In the Tropic of Orange, however, we see a western space that has been so rigorously defined (rigorously) that there is nothing left which is unknown. Man has total dominance over nature to the point where he can literally move the equator by his actions. The West is sort of like the meeting of two or more tectonic plates, representing the many cultures and peoples which sought their futures there, and now that they have met they are crashing together and changing the literal lay of the land. It's reminiscent of the "Terra forming" in Firefly. This story therefore is almost like an anti-western, or a distopian western. we see the fulfillment of the ultimate gal of all western, the taming of the West, and instead of happiness it has brought only misery and travesty. The destruction that Archangel saw in the opening of the western frontier by the great European explorers is now complete and there is going to be apocalyptic consequences for our defiling of nature. To that end, Archangel's death is almost a necessity, a martyr to stay the hand of humanity's demise. Only by relinquishing this control over nature can we be saved, as Bobby ultimately is when he lets go of the "lines".

Bobby and Language

            Though it is difficult to find a cohesive thread between Bobby’s chapters, if one examines the presence and attitude towards language within these sections, the organization becomes less confusing. One must keep in mind the first picture that is painted of the character in the beginning of the book: “If you know your Asians, you look at Bobby. You say, that’s Vietnamese…Turns out you’ll be wrong. And you gonna be confused. Dude speaks Spanish. Comprende? … Turns out Bobby’s from Singapore…Bobby Ngu…that’s not his real name. Real name’s Li Kwan Yu…Bobby’s Chinese. Chinese from Singapore with a Vietnam name speaking like a Mexican living in Koreatown. That’s it” (14-15). Immediately this is a character that is established through cultures and subsequently those culture’s languages. Whether this be through the names like the Vietnamese “Ngu” or the Chineses “Li Kwan Yu” or through actual words like “Comprende,” Bobby’s character is closely tied to a complex, woven system of languages and cultures. Through out his chapters, the sparse diction is scattered with Spanish phrases, as well as signals to how he treats languages themselves. He speaks English but doesn’t teach Rafaela, and instead she must learn through audio tapes. Although Bobby’s assortment of languages might appear jumbled or chaotic, he seems to have them separated in such a way that suits him and serves him well.

            Thus, in chapter forty when he’s viewing the television on which, his cousin is channel surfing he observes, “Tube’s got Korean channel speaking something. Maybe it’s Russian. Some’s Swahili. Spanish channel’s speaking English with an accent. Everybody in the Mexican soap’s speaking the Queen’s English. Other hand, network’s speaking fluent Castilian. Some’s even in Mandarin. He understands it. He’s thinking too it’s not a mistake; it all makes sense? But! … Who’s gonna understand all this all the time? This some joke” (232)? It is on the television that the blending and mixing of cultures and languages loses the necessary order and separation, becoming a mass of chaos. The separations that allow Bobby to understand the complexities in his life are lost within the TV, therefore leading him to wonder whether it’s a joke or not. 

Tropic of Orange and the West

After finishing Tropic of Orange and sifting through the craziness of it all, I think I'm starting to see an image of the West begin to form. In the previous books we read such as The Surrounded and The Professor's House, the West was written about as a place that was undergoing change. In both of the previous narratives that I mentioned the West is transforming from an original and authentic native culture to a caucasian dominated, civilized landscape. Tropic of Orange is much more recent than both of those books and in turn has a more modern feel. I like to think of Tropic of Orange as a continuation of the West that we have previously seen. It began with native people, then it was taken over by white Europeans and European Americans, and now it has in a sense come full circle as Los Angeles is seen as a mixing pot of race, ethnicity, and culture. While there are many fictional parts in Tropic of Orange this fact seems very realistic and appropriate.

Buzzworm: Repeating image of watches/time

In class on Monday we were all assigned a character to discuss. We never got to my groups character, Buzzworm, but I really wanted to talk about what we found. Also, I wanted to hear some other takes on it because we certainly did not cover everything. Basically, we found the following images/objects repeated in Buzzworm's chapters; trees, watches, time/history, and radio. The image that was most prevalent and that I want to discuss is watches/time. Buzzworm has this unusual obsession with watches and it is said that he has collected over 200. For Buzzworm I don’t think time is a series of seconds, minutes, and hours. I think time is more important to him than just numbers. I related time to his continual discussion of history. To Buzzworm time periods are important especially those of the past. The fact that he had strangers watches or strangers “outward reflections of time” give Buzzworm a better understanding of time than most people.  I believe this advanced understanding of time is the reason why in the last paragraph of Buzzworm’s final chapter Yamashita writes that Buzzworm is solar powered and “could not run out of time” (265).