I am reading All the Pretty Horses, the first in Cormac McCarthy’s so-called Border Trilogy. It is very beautiful. I have been jotting down some notes about what lines most move me.
Here’s some:
They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in the tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing. (29)
And:
He rode on, the two horses following, riding doves up out of the pools of standing water and the sun descending out of the dark discolored overcast to the west where its redness ran down the narrow band of sky above the mountains like blood falling through water and the desert fresh from the rain turning gold in the evening light and then deepening to dark, a slow inkening over of the bajada and the rising hills and the stark stone length of the cordilleras darkening far to the south in Mexico. The floodplain he crossed was walled about with fallen traprock and in the twilight the little desert foxes had come out to sit along the walls silent and regal as icons watching the night come and the doves called from the acacia and then night fell dark as Egypt and there was just the stillness and the silence and the sound of the horses breathing and the sound of their hooves clopping in the dark. He pointed his horse at the polestar and rode on and they rode the round moon up out of the east and coyotes yammered and answered back all across the plain to the south from which they’d come. (286)
This register strikes me as like some child of a cowboy Ginsberg and a cowboy Melville—the rhythmic1, run-on, whiplash sentences; the strange and malleable syntax somewhere between poetry and prose; the apocalyptic visions of the ecstatic violence and unquenchable restlessness lodged painfully and terminally in the American soul.
I really love the weaving of interior experience and outer landscape, the psychologization of the created world, the description teetering just on the edge of surreality but pulled back and anchored in concreteness: the texture of a leather bridle, the scent of a particular species of desert plant, the resumption of sardonic dialogue.
Here’s another example, slightly different:
They carried stiff new canvas pants to the rear of the store and tried them on in a bedroom that had three beds in it and a cold concrete floor that had once been painted green. They sat on one of the beds and counted their money. (120)
On first glance, a pretty unassuming passage. At least, not one of his thunderous galloping page-long paragraphs piling clause on clause like a painter daubing on thick impasto until the texture is pleasurably rough and undulating and reflecting light in all different directions.
But I was caught up by this seemingly humble descriptive phrasing: that had once been painted green.
Why? There is a deceptive simplicity here that pulls the reader deeper into the sense-world of the language precisely by holding back detail. Especially for a writer known for his painstaking attention to detail. McCarthy throughout presses his readers into for example a working knowledge of the historically-accurate terminology for the particular styles of horse bits in use in a certain region of northern Mexico in the nineteenth century, and many other such things.
But here we get this tossed-off descriptor, vague and almost enigmatic. If the concrete floor is no longer green, how do the characters know it was once painted green? And what color is it now? Why not just describe that then? Why mention it at all?
It really stopped me and forced me to try to imagine more fully what he could mean. And the image of the floor began to take shape: the old green paint, discolored by sun and age, chipped and peeling in organic blooms, revealing the flat gunmetal of the original concrete below. Light from the afternoon windows refracted through the dust and coming to rest on the pitted ground and casting a marbled pattern of tiny sharp shadows. The floor indeed no longer painted green, but emanating a sort of dappled shade of what was once a bright and hopeful green. An atmosphere therefore of decay, of nostalgia, faded plans, of the pride of a hardworking generation slowly worn down by time. And the valiant effort to contain the decay to the privacy of their personal quarters, the family bedroom with its three beds, speaking to the well of pride not yet being fully spent, yet unable to cope with the world’s mounting demands.
This imagery was suddenly very familiar to me. It was so many concrete floors I had played on or paced over impatiently as a child. In mechanics’ garages or the barber’s well-swept shop or the basement of some rural churchhouse waiting for my father to finish his business. Like the characters sitting on the bed I sat in chairs in waiting rooms or on couches and stared at my feet and below them that worn patina of old concrete. That line pulled such images out of me rather than supplying them to me.
Probably someone who hasn’t spent a lot of time in those sorts of buildings during a particular window in the nation’s lifecycle might not have such images available to well up and might just pass over the unassuming clause. Or someone from the old Tejas border towns will have totally different associations about such places that I now pass over none the wiser. That too is part of the dance: No text is ever a single text but rather endless new texts are created in the synthesis between each text and each reader.
I think—ok, I know—that if I had been writing this last passage from scratch, I would have tried to pile in a bunch of explicit and overwritten description of that floor and what it said to me and about the characters. Kind of like I just did above. And of course elsewhere McCarthy is not afraid to pile on page after page of description. Why did he choose not to here? I can’t say. Probably it is some amalgam of instinct, intuition, and experience that tells you when to say less and when to say more.
“So you’re saying there’s no rules or lesson here, you just have to try stuff and feel your way along? Great, thanks.”
Yeah. I think so. Pretty much.
The technical term here is polysyndetic but that’s a bit ungainly for my taste.
Polysyndetic!!!