"Plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape": Space, Place, and Identity in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy

Ashley Bourne
Western American Literature, Volume 44, Number 2, Summer 2009, pp. 108-125 (Article)
Published by The Western Literature Association DOI: 10.1353/wal.0.0024

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Bertha M. Landers. WEST TEXAS. N.d. Lithograph. 13" x 16 1/8". Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art. Volk Brothers Prize, Tenth Annual Dallas Allied Art Exhibition, 1939.

Plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape: Space, Place, and Identity in Cormac McCarthys Border Trilogy
Ashley Bourne Two brothers venture to Mexico to find their dead fathers stolen horses. What kind of place is this? Boyd said. I dont know, his brother answers (Crossing 193). For all the cowboys, wanderers, villains, and prophets in Cormac McCarthys Border Trilogy, the western landscape is arguably the most striking character in the novels, and figuring out just what kind of place McCarthy has constructed can be a formidable task. McCarthys creation of the wilderness landscapes and ephemeral villages throughout the series relies on the deep connection between place and identity and the inscrutable processes by which each is formed. The idea that place is eventmental, constantly in flux as the pivot where space and time conjoin, is central to understanding the impact that the landscape has on McCarthys wandering men, who seek to claim a sense of identity by moving in a landscape heavy with its own sense of volatility and change (Casey 38). This is the central paradox of the construction of space and place as well as the construction of identity: that one longs for stability, a fixed sense of place and self, but that one is also compelled to perpetual motion, seeking out those spaces where place and self will stabilize. The tension within a landscape that seems both longingly romanticized and brutally real foregrounds a sense of loss that pervades the trilogy. The landscapes of the southwestern United States and Mexico, with their primeval mountains and deserts, provide McCarthy with a spectacular embodiment of this paradox; even as the characters pass through these places in the present, attention is called to the primitive vestiges of the landscape as well as its uncertain future as the land is scarred, ranches are sold, and families fall apart. To understand this connection between place and identity, and how McCarthy uses the western landscape as the lynchpin to join these concepts in his Border Trilogy, it is necessary to consider the construction of the physical landscape in McCarthys texts.1 The emergent field of place studies provides a means for examining the concrete, physical terrain as
Western American Literature 44.2 (Summer 2009): 109-25

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well as the internal perspectives of the characters and the dynamic nature of place itself as it parallels the process of identity formation. Lawrence Buells definition of placeness as co-constituted environmentally, socially, and phenomenologically helps to explain the complexity McCarthy manages to imbue in the terrain (145). This type of phenomenological approach is practiced by philosopher Yi-Fu Tuan, who emphasizes experiential knowledge based on kinesthetic and perceptual experience to conceptualize place (Space 73). Also relying on this experiential perspective, Edward S. Casey contends that the living-moving body is essential to the process of emplacement: lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them. Bodies and places interanimate each other (24). This focus on the connection between bodies and places helps to foreground the protagonists struggle to establish their own identities as entwined with the identities they assign to certain places. The novels each begin in a specific placethe Cole ranch, Billys bedroom in the Parham house, and a Mexican brotheland end with a movement into a more abstracted space: the first two novels end with the protagonists staring into unknown landscapes, and the final volume ends with Billy as an old man falling asleep, entering the formless space of dreams. This structure aligns itself with Caseys argument that the knowledge of place is actually prior to space, challenging the common assumption that space is absolute and infinite as well as empty and a priori in status [while] places become the mere apportionings of space (16, 14). In essence, Casey prioritizes the particular knowledge of a specific place over the more generalized notion of space; place must exist before one can conceptualize space and not the other way around, as is frequently assumed. Consequently, in place, one can be rooted; in space, one must be adrift. Building on Caseys argument that space and time are contained in places rather than places in them creating an experiental topology, I argue that McCarthys juxtaposition of external details of the land, internal perceptions of the protagonists, and memories of historic actions, each tied to specific places, creates a catalyst for the evolution of personal identity and the identity of place (44). Further, the experiential perspective emphasized here is inextricably attached to a sense of loss because the perceptions that comprise a phenomenological awareness are, by their very nature, constantly in flux, unable to be stabilized and therefore always in the process of being lost. So for McCarthy, it is inevitable that the very process of movement from place to space produces this sense of loss. This multidimensional composition of place described by Casey is evident in the descriptions of the land, the interactions between human dwellers, and the insights of the main characters as they move across the

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country. McCarthys rich imagery of the terrain manages to immerse the reader in an environment that is simultaneously a romanticized vista of open plains and, more subtly, the site of increasing technological and industrial expansion. In The Crossing (1994), the second novel of the trilogy, Billy Parham regards the Mexican countryside with its ranges of mountains beyond the plain range on range in pales of blue where the terrain lay clawed open north and south, canyon and range, sierra and barranca, all of it waiting like a dream for the world to come, world to pass. He saw the smoke of a locomotive passing slowly downcountry over the plain forty miles away (135). The particular details of geography and topography render a highly realistic landscape but also one that slips into reverie. To the observer, the environment is real and dreamlike at the same time, which is to say, it possesses the elements of space and place. While Billy studies a landscape that appears to conform to his fantasy of untouched country, the train here is a very real harbinger of the mechanized progress, a literal machine in the garden, that is quickly changing the face of the western landscape in these novels.2 The smoke and tracks that penetrate the environment are echoed later in Cities of the Plain (1998) as Billy sleeps near a desolate highway construction site and mistakes a radar tracking station for a church. The landscape is increasingly littered with the evidence of intrusive human activitywet creosote, rags of plastic, smoke, concrete, and even the missiles being tracked from the stationand the characters waver between their long-held illusions about the nature of the landscape and the emerging physical reality of construction and industry which create a space that is fast becoming unrecognizable and inscrutable to its inhabitants (289). By juxtaposing the dreamlike perceptions of the characters and the physical details of the environment, McCarthys landscapes create a praxis of space and place, combining particular topographical details with human movement and activity to continually destabilize the much-desired secure sense of place. The actions of the characters, as well as the shadows of earlier conflicts associated with sociopolitical strife in Mexico and the southwestern United States, add an element of social construction that also shapes the environment. Casey contends that the power of place consists in gathering these lives and things, each with its own space and time, into one arena of common engagement (26). The trilogy is peppered with places that are defined by conflicted human interactions, both in the present and the past: Zacatecas, where John Grady and Alejandra walk through the Plazuela de Guadalajarita, the site of her grandfathers death in a clash between revolutionaries and militia; John Gradys grandfathers ranch, where he imagines the ghostly shades of Comanche war-

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riors long dead; and the radar station in Cities of the Plain, alluding to rapidly developing nuclear missile technology after World War II. The backdrop of human conflict is constantly evident; besides the allusions to the invasion and genocide of Native Americans and the turn-of-thecentury revolution in Mexico, McCarthy includes signs that the history of violent human conquest in these places is giving way to a more subtle, contemporary violence in the form of technological progress and economic change.3 Jacqueline Scoones contends that McCarthys portrayal of the U.S. military industrial complex during this period is connected to both local and international damage (137). So the history and cultural presence in these places contributes to their identity along with the protagonists individual awareness of place. These layers demonstrate Caseys notion that the young mensand the readersperceptions of place are shaped as much by internal horizons of personal experience as by the external horizons of location (17). Scoones reinforces this notion that when place as process is a process of rapid change increasingly dictated by distant forces and demands, the lives of inhabitants are disrupted and the results are disorienting (13536). Through this interplay between inhabitants, physical terrain, and unseen forces, McCarthys approach reinforces precisely what the phenomenological consideration of place seeks to convey: what being in places is all about, namely, the primordial depth that, far from being imputed to sensations , already situates them in a scene of which we ourselves form part (Casey 17). This depth is achieved by a palimpsest of historical events underlying contemporary entry into man-made environments, the towns and buildings, which McCarthy describes as though the events have seeped into the very mortar used to construct such places. While the human interactions and conflicts reverberate most clearly in the towns, the sensory immersion of the protagonists in the landscape is evident most clearly in the wilderness spaces they travel through, which seem to evoke the purest moments of phenomenological awareness. As Billy camps on the plains before returning to Mexico to find his brothers body, he is consumed by the loneliness of his position, a loneliness that is echoed by the isolated landscape: He slept on the ground. He built a small fire but he had little wood and the fire died in the night and he woke and watched the winter stars slip their hold and race to their deaths in the darkness. He saw far to the south beyond the Hatchet Mountains the flare of lightning over Mexico and he knew that he would not be buried in this valley but in some distant place among strangers. (Crossing 346)

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His physical proximity to the ground in this scene belies his sense of emotional displacement. He lies on top of the ground, thinking about his own burial. Although he is alone in the wilderness, intimately aware of the terrain, he does not feel a part of the place. Instead he senses the uncertainty of his position in the world and the inevitable indeterminacy of his final resting place. This lingering isolation, constantly reinforced by the protagonists travel across open spaces, affirms Tuans assertion that space can be variously experienced as the relative location of objects or places, as the distances or expanses that separate or link places (Space 12). McCarthy straddles this play between space and place by situating his novels in border spaces, where characters continually cross and recross borders, geographically and socially constructed, creating a liminal landscape where place is constantly transformed back into space, disengaged through the process of movement. The characters awareness of this transformation is revealed through the phenomenological moments of primordial depth (Casey 17). This complex process of creating place, then, is analogous to the fluid process by which identity is formed and reformed. Both are progressive, which ensures that they will never reach a final static form even though that is the individuals goal. Doreen Massey explains in her chapter A Global Sense of Place how a sense of place, of rootedness, can provide stability and a source of unproblematical identity (151). Although Massey is not explicitly dealing with literature in her assessment, McCarthys protagonists long for this sense of rootedness in the landscape that seemingly equates with their deep desire for a stable, knowable identity. But the desire for stability paradoxically leads to a compulsion to move, perhaps because of an unconscious recognition on the part of the central characters of the impossibility of self-development through physical stasis. Despite both mens strong affinities for their homes, there was little possibility for either individual to develop had they stayed, though they would be reluctant to admit that fact. John Grady would be stuck on a failing ranch, and Billy would be unable to follow his conscience with respect to the natural world. So they seek out other places where growth is possible, not realizing that they are actually drawn to the myth of such places. This prolongs the sense of loss because they continue to uproot themselves by moving and because they seek destinations that exist only in memory and myth. The events and, by extension, the places that shape the individuals in the Border Trilogy are constantly being overwritten when an individual moves away from a place and from the memory of those events. As Tim Cresswell argues, place is the raw material for the creative production of identity rather than an a priori label of identity. Place in this sense

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becomes an event rather than a secure ontological thing rooted in notions of the authentic. Place as an event is marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence (39). Cresswell, like Massey, emphasizes the fluidity of place, which contributes to the paradox that arises when the wanderers feel an attachment to landscapes that are inevitably changing, landscapes in which they cannot stay. Cresswell argues that place needs to be understood as an embodied relationship with the world. Places are constructed by people doing things and in this sense are never finished but are constantly being performed (37). As Billy rides through the Mexican wilderness on his errand in The Crossing, his senses of identity and placeness are transformed by the space he enters, distancing him from the comforting memory of home place. He rides amidst a shelf of gray rock [and] scrub juniper where the terrain lay clawed open, and he feels himself uprooted: his home had come to seem remote and dreamlike (135). This seems to reinforce the importance of a phenomenological element in the novels, as McCarthys descriptions often substitute metaphysical descriptions of the landscape for the characters internal thoughts; the thought process is reflected in and by the landscape that lies before them, which is why their identities are so entwined with the terrain. This connection frequently reveals itself in the moments when characters are forced to make pivotal choices, choices that they sense will affect the courseliterally and metaphoricallyof their lives. In The Crossing, Billy catches a she-wolf and decides, instead of killing her and claiming the money for her hide, to return her to Mexico and set her free: Ahead an hours ride lay Cloverdale and the road north. South lay the open country. The yellow grass heeled under the blowing wind and sunlight was running over the country before the moving clouds. The horse shook its head and stamped and stood. Damn all of it, he said. Just damn all of it. He turned the horse and crossed through the ditch and rode up onto the broad plain that stretched away before him south toward the mountains of Mexico. (63) What McCarthy describes is not the internal process of Billys decision but the landscape as it represents the choice that lies before him. In this sense, the landscape becomes a sort of paysage moralis and an embodiment of his conflict. Describing the view to the north, McCarthy provides the name of the town and a road, a defined destination. But to the south, there is only tantalizing open country. The focus on movement in the next linethe wind is blowing, the sunlight is runningemphasizes the

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unspoken fact that Billy is still and lends a certain urgency to his decision. The horses stamping reflects his impatience, confirmed by his own curses before he heads south, away from home, back into Mexico. The reader is left with the sense that this choice is less a logical decision than a compulsion, something that Billy cannot resist; in this case, the inscrutable open plains win out over the familiar road home, because Billy knows what waits for the wolfand presumably for himselfif he takes her home. He becomes aware of his own conscience, choosing to follow a code of honor different from the communitys and even his fathers, both of whom would advocate killing the wolf for its hide. Billy, however, finds himself in sympathy with the wild creature, which perhaps explains the lure that the open country holds for him and his desire to restore the wolf to freedom. This is also an attempt to free himself from the strictures of the community, asserting his own identity as one fascinated with the energy of the natural world rather than one who seeks to dominate it. His early experience sneaking out to watch the wolves hunt at night reveals his captivation with the way the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire (Crossing 4). The wolves are not threatening but magical to Billy, and this feeling is clearly a transgression in a community full of ranchers and livestock. Wildness, whether embodied in landscape, animal, or people (arguably his brother Boyd), will call out to Billy all his life. In All the Pretty Horses (1992), the landscape fulfills a similar function as the open spaces correspond to John Gradys emotional consciousness. Riding away from La Pursima for the last time, after his lover, Alejandra, leaves him, he connects the distant and isolated villages to his internal desolation. He rode at night and as he rode he saw small villages distant on the plain that glowed a faint yellow in that incoordinate dark and he knew that the life there was unimaginable to him (257). Movement here serves to highlight the alienation John Grady feels, turning placethe villages into nameless, formless space. The consequences of movement become ways by which the protagonists attempt to shape their own characters, and McCarthys deliberate focus on the visual representation of terrain as allegorical elucidates the connection between landscape and identity. Place and identity come together in the ideal of home space, which is essentially what the characters leave and then try to recreate throughout the trilogy. In the chapter Attachment to Homeland, in his foundational text Space and Place, Tuan argues that place is an archive of fond memories and splendid achievements that inspire the present; place is permanent and hence reassuring to man, who sees frailty in himself and chance and flux everywhere (154). Certainly, John Grady and Billy hold

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these fixed, unwavering pictures of their home places in their minds eyes. In Cities of the Plain, Billy, now an old man, still dreams of his sister dead seventy years. When she passed the house he knew that she would never enter there again nor would he see her ever again and in his sleep he called out to her but she did not turn or answer him but only passed on down that empty road in infinite sadness and infinite loss (26566). He still envisions his young sister and the family homestead, abandoned decades earlier, unchanged in his mind. What he desires and has lost is bound up in the landscape: the home, the empty road. Death here is also connected to the landscape; both men frequently dream of the dead, usually when they are camping out on the open plains. These figures that haunt their dreamssisters, fathers, brothersare always placed in a definite landscape, as though the terrain somehow allows them to connect to a realm of existence beyond the concrete, living world. In this way, landscape is a constant reminder of loss. In All the Pretty Horses, John Grady is forced to leave his grandfathers ranch when his mother decides to sell the land after the old mans death. Rather than go to school, as she insists, he leaves for a nomadic existence working as a ranch hand in Mexico. Leaving San Angelo, John Grady and Rawlins ride out onto the plains: They rode not under but among [the stars] 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 (30). The landscape here transforms itself to encompass their experience, open and boundless but with the underlying connotation that they are somehow fugitives, thieves stealing into the night. When John Grady comes to reside at La Pursima ranch, breaking horses and working the land, he is again cultivating a sense of identity attached to place. Even in the subconscious moments between waking and sleep, his thoughts were of horses and of the open country and of horses. Horses still wild on the mesa whod never seen a man afoot and who knew nothing of him or his life yet in whose souls he would come to reside forever (11718). The open spaces and the untamed horses are intertwined in his consciousness functioning as a sort of Lacanian objet petit a, an emblem of the lost place in which he would ultimately like to dwell but which is an impossibility. This image, like the ten thousand worlds for the choosing, ultimately suggests something that, while tantalizing, is so far beyond the reach of the protagonists that it will never be obtained. These mental landscapes designate a space that is intangible and inaccessible, a space of unfulfilled longing. Physical landscapes have the power also to evoke this longing, at times distancing the protagonists from a sense of place. When John

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Jerry Bywaters. BONE YARD. 1938. Lithograph. Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art. Gift of the Estate of Jerry Bywaters.

Grady returns to San Angelo for the funeral of Abuela, who worked for his family her whole life, he experiences something akin to vertigo as he is literally disoriented by the landscape that he no longer feels a part of: [He] put on his hat and turned his wet face to the wind and for a moment he held out his hands as if to steady himself or as if to bless the ground there or perhaps as if to slow the world that was rushing away and seemed to care nothing for the old or the young (Horses 301). John Grady instinctively thinks to bless the ground because it is the physical land that will hold the bodies of the dead, providing a sense of communion, while the indifferent world is only rushing away. Billy has a similar experience upon returning from Mexico to his familys old house after the murder of his parents. His first memories of coming to their home in Hidalgo are rooted in the landscape: In the country theyd quit lay the bones of a sister and the bones of his maternal grandmother. The new country was rich and wild. He carried Boyd before him and in the bow of the saddle and named to him features of the landscape and birds and animals in both spanish and english (Crossing 1). This naming of the landscape to soothe his brother bespeaks a fascination with and a deep, intimate

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knowledge of place; he is literally emplacing himself in the new territory where he will dwell. And death is once again a part of the landscape, with the bones buried in a place so that the identity of that place merges with the physical remains of human inhabitants. Much later, when Billy returns to find the house empty, a bloodstained mattress is the only trace of the events that have occurred: His hands reached about in the air and finally he took hold of the bedpost and gripped it for support. After a while he looked up and after a while he walked over to the window. Where the noon light lay over the fields. Bright on the Animas Peaks. He looked at it all and he fell to his knees in the floor (Crossing 165). When he looks out into the vast emptiness of the land surrounding the house, the realization that his parents are deadmurdered is all the more powerful and the landscape is once again connected to loss. The space is filled by his experience of loss, and that is how Billy transforms space into place, thus redefining that place. Each human bond that is severed by death is reflected in John Gradys and Billys visceral reactions which occur in specific spaces that seem to contain the sense of that loss, a sort of pathetic fallacy. As a nameless Indian warns Billy in The Crossing, while [the world] seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them (134). Consistently, once a place is established in the protagonists minds, once they think they have defined it, it inevitably seems to disintegrate into space, unknowable and without external meaning. This transformation of place into space indicates an unraveling of a system of meaning. That is, the physical location is able to evoke emotional reactions, but as the external qualities of a place change, the meanings that place holds must be internalized, centered within the individuals as they cope with a physical terrain that has either disappeared or is no longer available to them except through memory and history. The past, then, is both evoked and destabilized by motion and movement. Casey writes, to be emplaced is to know the hollowness of any strict distinction between what is inside ones mind or body and what is outside, or between what is perceived and what is remembered or imagined, or between what is natural and what is cultural (36). In each book of the trilogy, John Grady and Billy ride through places that, though empty and peaceful at the moment, are haunted by the echoes of violence and primitive history. Places are constructed here by shadows of events from the past. At the opening of All the Pretty Horses, John Grady rides across his grandfathers ranch after the funeral, imagining visions of the Native American inhabitants of the land: At the hour hed always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted

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ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north the warriors would ride on in that darkness theyd become, rattling past with their stone-age tools of war in default of all substance and singing softly in blood and longing south across the plains to Mexico (56). The ranch, about to be sold, is a place inhabited for John Grady by the recent past of his childhood and by the spirits of the people that dwelled on the land for hundreds of years before he was born. The mention of Native American warriors alludes to the centuries of conflict with US military and settlers, subtly evoking the violent expulsion of the Natives from their own home spaces. The landscape is possessed by memory, and the past reverberates across the terrain. This sense of the past as embedded in the landscape offers the possibility of a collective memory that is located in the physical world, distinct from what is contained in the human mind. The identity of place resides partially in its past, and characters are frequently disoriented by changes that challenge their vision of that past. At the end of Cities of the Plain, as Billy, now an old man, wanders across a contemporary landscape, the tremulous connection between the past and the future is evident in his tentative perceptions. He looks across the landscape: Out on the desert to the west stood what he took for one of the ancient spanish missions of that country but when he studied it again he saw that it was the round white dome of a radar tracking station (289). Here, a church, a place that embodies spiritual ontology, is replaced in the vision by the radar station, embodying a much less mystical, even sterile, scientific purpose. There is an implied reduction from religious mystery to technological rationality, very different from the earlier vision of ten thousand worlds for the choosing when John Grady strikes out for Mexico (Pretty Horses 30). Billys dawning awareness of the transformation of historical landmarks into such unfamiliar modern counterparts exemplifies the transformation of the western landscape and even the loss of the romanticized way of life in which the protagonists are seeking futilely to immerse themselves. There are recognitions throughout the trilogy of the loss of cowboy culture and traditional ranching, replaced by corporate ventures and technological colonization. John Gradys mother sells the ranch because it has barely paid expenses for twenty years (Horses 15). Billy looks for work after returning from Mexico only to find ranch after ranch shutting down or sold out. By the end of the final novel, there was no work in that country anywhere, and Billy is living a transient existence (Cities 264). He works part-time as an extra in a movie, a job that fittingly highlights the anachronism of his former way of life on the ranch; the cowboy is now only a myth recreated in the movies, often to haunting effect as with another McCarthy novel that comments on the disappear-

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ing western ethos, No Country for Old Men (2005). The West, or at least the romanticized version of it, is also a recreation, a figment pieced together with scraps from the past. The new incarnation of the western landscape is scarred by highways, the muted rumble of east-west traffic, the smell of wet creosote, and rags of plastic wrapping hanging from a fence (Cities 265, 289, 289). There are few vestiges here of the former richness of the natural landscape, which is now mutilated by construction and industry. This jarring recognition of the eventmental quality of place is only possible, however, when memory is juxtaposed with the present condition. Simon Schama describes the intangible connection between landscape and memory as a tenuous echo, indicating that to see the ghostly outline of an old landscape beneath the superficial covering of the contemporary is to be made vividly aware of the endurance of core myths (16). McCarthys landscapes lend themselves to this mythologizing as they seem rooted in the stories of past events, many violent, but also disconnected from time. Descriptions of Billy as an aged wanderer at the end of Cities of the Plain demonstrate this sense of disconnection, as he moves through a world where pasture gates stood open and sand drifted in the roads and after a few years it was rare to see stock of any kind and he rode on. Days of the world. Years of the world. Till he was old (264). Even McCarthys linguistic structure here exemplifies the central paradox of stasis and mobility; the juxtaposition of lengthy descriptions of the features of the landscape allows the reader to pause and visualize the deserted roads and plains, remaining still to absorb the imagery. This panorama is set jarringly against the short, spare sentences which denote the passage of decades of Billys life, with no concrete imagery. The sense of a timeless and nameless landscapeonce again, place transformed into abstract spacelends itself to the quality of myth. Myth exists in space rather than place; as Tuan elucidates, there is a hazy mythical space that surrounds the field of pragmatic activity, to which we do not consciously attend and which is yet necessary to our sense of orientationof being securely in the world (Space 86). McCarthys characters are able to explore this mythic space when they ride into Mexico and the wilderness, seeking to fulfill the quests they have assigned to themselves complicated by the haunting power of memory. John Grady seeks to recreate the pastoralism of his memories of ranch life, while Billys early memories of a mystical wild landscape compel him to a nomadic existence, attempting always to recapture the unity of the moment in the woods as a young boy where he senses the presence of another world entire (Crossing 4). It is the mythic lifestyle associated with the West that John Grady and Billy attempt to cling to in creating their identity. Tuan explains how the deep connection between myth and identity manifests in the physical ter-

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rain: Landscape is personal and tribal history made visible. The natives identityhis place in the total scheme of thingsis not in doubt, because the myths that support it are as real as the rocks and waterholes he can see and touch. He finds recorded in his land the ancient story of the lives and deeds of the immortal beings from whom he himself is descended, and whom he reveres (Space 15758). This is perhaps the unconscious reason for the wanderlust: the characters are seeking that connection to tribal history, a history larger and more extensive than their personal experience. The life of the cowboy, attuned to the weather, the livestock, and the land, riding miles of open country, is connected inextricably with the uninhabited landscape that is necessary for that way of life. In US cultural mythology, wilderness has come to be associated with the frontier and pioneer past; it was an environment that promoted toughness and virility. The growing appreciation of wilderness, like that of the countryside, was a response to the real and imagined failings of city life (Tuan, Topophilia 111). But McCarthys characters find that this romanticized, simplistic vision of western life is ultimately transitory, as one by one the places they inhabit to seek this identity become unavailable to them. John Grady finds a substitute for his grandfathers ranch in Mexico, at La Pursima, but he is ultimately thrust out of this adopted landscape as well because of his inability to separate the romanticized vision of the place and the reality of social convention. His subsequent incarceration in a nightmarish Mexican jail disrupts the evolution he desires, shaping his experience through brutality. The sudden disruption and ensuing violence cause John Grady to question his self-worth, as he explains to the judge in Texas his guilt over killing a fellow prisoner in self-defense: I dont know nothin about him. I never even knew his name. He could of been a pretty good old boy. I dont know. I dont know that hes supposed to be dead (Horses 291). Billy similarly questions his identity after losing Boyd in Mexico and returning to the States to make multiple failed attempts at joining the army. Alone, wandering, camping on the plains, he said softly before he slept again that the one thing he knew of all things claimed to be known was that there was no certainty to any of it (Crossing 346). When their identities are challenged, usually through the loss of a meaningful place, the characters move back into space, open country where they have no sense of rootedness. Massey criticizes this ideal of place as fixed and secure as a symptom of romanticized escapism that is often reactionary and runs counter to more progressive notions of place (150). However, she seems to disagree with the notion that loss inevitably attends the instability of place, and her charge of escapism is borne out in McCarthys trilogy. Although the

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characters try to avoid the coming changes through continued mobility in a landscape they have each romanticized, they find that their ideas about place eventually fall apart, as do their initial constructions of self. Both boys leave their home landscapes; when they return, they and their home landscapes are irrevocably altered. When John Grady finally returns to Texas after parting from Alejandra, he does not even feel at home in the formerly familiar space: He rode up onto Texas soil pale and shivering and he sat the horse briefly and looked out over the plain to the north where cattle were already beginning to appear slouching slowly out of that pale landscape and bawling softly at the horses and he thought about his father who was dead in that country and he sat the horse naked in the falling rain and wept (Horses 286). The landscape once again is emblematic of loss, triggering the emotional reaction to his fathers death, an event he has not been informed of yet but that he senses in the moment where the pale landscape and rain coalesce into an experiential reality. This feeling, closely akin to what postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha terms unhomeliness (13), is reflected in the physical landscapes of the trilogy, exemplified by John Grady riding into the desert at the end of All the Pretty Horses: The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised. He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west across the evening land and the small desert birds flew chittering among the dry bracken and horse and rider and horse passed on. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come (302). He is almost absorbed here in the landscape, turned red by the dust and setting sun. However, there seems little hope for refuge, and once again place is transformed into space, formless and disconnected from the human element that moves through it. Here time also becomes dislodged from the praxis of space. The movement from the particular moment, which is to say, place, into an abstraction of the world to come suggests the dissolution of linear time, a quality of liminal space. The experience of movement is highlighted throughout the trilogy, and the characters possess a sort of experiential mobility, moving through the landscape but at the same time absorbing its essence. Places are constructed through motion within existing boundaries. McCarthys characters move within and between boundaries, and their sensitivity often unconsciousto the physical terrain acts as a sort of conduit. Keith Basso, another practitioner of place studies, explains this process simply by saying, the experience of sensing places, then, is thus both roundly reciprocal and incorrigibly dynamic (55). This dynamic interplay between landscape and human lies at the heart of experiential mobility. It is in these moments that the characters become aware of a collective consciousness that is rooted in the landscape larger than their own understanding.

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John Grady camps on a barren mesa after recovering his horses at gunpoint from the captain at La Encantada; he shoots a deer and imagines Alejandra: The sky was dark and a cold wind ran through the bajada and in the dying light a cold blue cast had turned the does eye to but one thing more of things she lay among in that darkening landscape. Grass and blood. Blood and stone. Stone and the dark medallions that the first flat drops of rain caused upon them. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. (Horses 282) The detailed imagery of landscape is interspersed with physical sensation and emotional recollection, creating what Casey terms synesthetic perception: to be actively passive; it is to be absorptive yet constitutive, both at once (18). The images of the natural worldgrass, stone, and the deercombine with John Gradys memories to coalesce into a moment of recognition, where he comes to terms with his own sense of loss. The sky and the light are rapidly darkening, the weather is changing to rain, but the grass and rocks are fixed; it is this paradox between stability and change that triggers John Gradys emotional memory and allows him to transcend for a moment and achieve insight. Such moments of insight in all three novels frequently occur when characters are moving through the landscape, riding through open range outside of social and political boundaries. It is in these moments that they have the clearest sense of identity, which is somewhat ironic considering they must leave their familiar home places to achieve such insights. Throughout the trilogy, the processes by which place and identity are constructed are similarly conflicted: the desire for a fixed, stable meaning is juxtaposed with the inevitable shifting quality of space so that identity and place are always in a state of becoming. Even when the protagonists find a meaningful place, they cannot stay still. At the McGovern ranch in Cities of the Plain, John Grady is compelled back into Mexico, this time for love of the epileptic prostitute Magdalena, and Billy leaves the ranch after John Gradys death to resume his wandering. This combination of absorption and motion, stasis and flux, lays bare the conflict faced by these characters and, in a larger sense, the central dichotomy of the West: the conflict between progress and preservation, which is to say, the battle over the identity of the region. The reconstruction of the West in the twentieth century through countless water projects, agricultural enterprises, and technological development creates a constant tension with the often romanticized vision of the West as a mythologized, sacred space, wherein

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wilderness remains powerful and unchanged. McCarthy describes these increasing changes in small ways throughout the text: places where ranches close, livestock disappears from the land, trains and roads cross the plains indicate the mercurial quality of the West. These losses, along with the marks they leave on the protagonists own bodies, are the signs and wonders that make a landscape (Cities 291). This is the tension underlying McCarthys novels: the desire to reclaim a vision of the mythic West of years past entwined with a pragmatic recognition of the inevitable forces that must sweep the myth away. Loss continually defines the individuals and the region. The powerful desire of John Grady and Billy to retain the memory of a stable home place and to develop their identities based on places that are always shifting, always changing, always disappearing, speaks to the innate human need to be rooted in physical place, though that desire proves impossible to fulfill in McCarthys trilogy.
Notes 1. Although it is nearly impossible to write about McCarthys Border Trilogyor any of his works, for that matterwithout mentioning the landscape, few works have dealt with his actual construction of place from a phenomenological approach. The landscape has typically been considered in terms of historicism, allegory, or myth. Several critics have analyzed the landscape in the context of pastoralism, concluding similarly that these novels essentially depict the death of the American pastoral dream (Sickels and Oxoby 347). Georg Guillemins study focusing on ecopastoralism in McCarthy concludes that pastoral subject, melancholy mood, and allegoresis interact to redefine American pastoralism along ecosophical lines while subjecting it to the typological nostalgia that characterizes all antecedent forms of pastoralism (140). This archetypal designation of the setting corresponds with another popular strain of criticism on McCarthy: consideration of the mythic journey in the novels, examining the allegorical nature of the land that the characters move through. But such readings ignore the reality of the terrain and its experiential rendering. Jay Ellis does deal with the transformation of space into place in McCarthys earlier western novel, Blood Meridian, albeit through a historical framework, positing that the transformation of country, from space to place, enacts a parallel movement in the book from philosophy to history (87). Such readings neglect the nature of space itself in favor of the cultural implications. 2. See Leo Marxs The Machine in the Garden (1964) for a discussion of the dichotomy between the conflicting US obsessions with technological progress and the pastoral vision. 3. Scoones deals more extensively with the historical events and sociopolitical unrest interwoven throughout McCarthys trilogy, discussing at length the catalysts forcing change in the landscape and individuals: the development

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of military technology in the Southwest, nuclear testing, railroad and highway construction, to name a few. Works Cited Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape. In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso. 5390. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Casey, Edward S. How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena. In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso. 1352. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996. Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Ellis, Jay. What happens to country in Blood Meridian. Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 60.1 (2006): 8597. Guillemin, Georg. The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage, 1992. . Cities of the Plain. New York: Knopf, 1998. . The Crossing. New York: Knopf, 1994. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Knopf, 1995. Scoones, Jacqueline. The World on Fire: Ethics and Evolution in Cormac McCarthys Border Trilogy. In A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy, edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, 13160. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Sickels, Robert C., and Mark Oxoby. In Search of a Further Frontier: Cormac McCarthys Border Trilogy. Critique 43.4 (Summer 2002): 34759. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. . Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974.