Cities of the Plain: The End of the All-American Cowboys

Year 2021, Issue: 55, 207 - 242, 01.05.2021

Vahit Yaşayan

Abstract

This article analyzes Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain
(1998), the last installment of The Border Trilogy, and scrutinizes his
portraits of cowboy masculinity. Not only does the article consider
the way McCarthy deals with wounded masculinity and the adult
Western genre in the novel, but it also discusses how the protagonists,
John Grady and Billy, end their illusions concerning their cowboy
masculinity, as each comes to terms with the fact that the cowboy
lifestyle is based on a myth, and that there are no more frontiers in the
world for would-be cowboys to ride. McCarthy’s cowboy protagonists
must negotiate a West that is no longer the province of the cowboy
in the millennium, but rather the site of twentieth-century military
installations, large corporate ranches, and frightening modern-day
bureaucracies. The key to survival in this vexed post-West world turns
out to be not adherence to the old regional myths and conventions—
no matter how attractive that might seem—but instead, a turn towards
healthier masculinities. While the cowboys’ epic journeys may evoke
a noble and masculine western tradition, as McCarthy illustrates, they
are doomed to fail because of the upheaval and displacement of the
community and culture in which such masculinities thrived.

Keywords

Western, Cowboy Masculinity, Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain, Myth of the West

References

• Arnold, Edwin T. “The Last of the Trilogy: First Thoughts on Cities of the Plain.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne Luce. University Press of Mississippi, 1999, pp, 221-246.
• Barcus, James E. “Sin and Grace: The Ethical Complexities of Colliding Theological Visions in McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain.” Intégrité: A Faith and Learning Journal, vol 11, no. 1, 2012, pp. 41-49.
• Caldwell, Gail. “The Unsheltering Sky: Cormac McCarthy Completes His Trilogy of Man’s Fate in the Borderlands.” The Boston Globe, May 10, 1998.
• Campbell, Neil. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. University of Nebraska Press, 2013.
• Canfield, J. Douglas. “Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic in McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy.” Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. University Press of Mississippi, 2011, pp. 256-269.
• Dirda, Michael. “The Last Roundup.” The Washington Post, 1998, p.L5.
• Cormac McCarthy Papers, McCarthy Cormac. “Correspondence,” Box 70-71, Folder 1-2-3, Southwestern Writers Collection, The Wittliff Collections, Texas State University at San Marcos.
• ---. Notes on “Cities of the Plain,” Box 69, Folder 1, Southwestern Writers Collection, The Wittliff Collections, Texas State University at San Marcos.
• Ellis, Jay. No Place for Home: Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy. Routledge, 2006.
• Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Stein and Day, 1975.
• Fregoso, Rosa Linda. MeXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. University of California Press, 2003.
• French, Philip. Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre. Carcanet, 2011. Hall, Michael. “Desperately Seeking Cormac.” Texas Monthly, 1998, pp. 76-79.
• Hickman, Trenton. “Against Nostalgia: Turning the Page of Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain.” Western American Literature, vol. 42, no. 2, 2017, pp. 142–63.
• Hillier, Russell. “‘Like Some Supplicant to the Darkness over Them All’: The Good of John Grady Cole in Cormac McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 14, no. 1, 2016, pp. 3–36.
• Jarrett, Robert L. Cormac McCarthy. Twayne Publishers & Prentice Hall International, 1997.
• ---. “Cormac McCarthy’s Sense of an Ending: Serialized Narrative and Revision in Cities of the Plain.” Cormac McCarthy: New Directions. Ed. James D. Lilley. University of New Mexico Press, 2014, pp. 313-347.
• Josyph, Peter. Adventures in Reading Cormac McCarthy. 2010. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. 3rd Ed. Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Kollin, Susan. “Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the Contemporary Western.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 42, no. 3, 2001, pp. 557–588.
• ---. Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space. University of Nebraska Press, 2017.
• Lamont, Victoria. Westerns: A Women’s History. University of Nebraska Press, 2016.
• Luce, Dianne. “The Vanishing World of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy. Ed. Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce. University Press of Mississippi, 2011, pp.161-197.
• McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses, Everyman’s Library, 1993.
• ---. Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West. Vintage, 1993.
• ---. Cities of the Plain. Everyman’s Library, 1998.
• ---. The Crossing. Everyman’s Library, 1999.
• Mitchell, Lee Clark. Late Westerns: The Persistence of a Genre. University of Nebraska Press, 2018.
• Mundik, Petra. “‘Beauty and Loss Are One’: Transience and Fate in Cities of the Plain.” A Bloody and Barbarous God: The Metaphysics of Cormac McCarthy. University of New Mexico Press, 2016, pp. 201-207.
• Oates, Joyce Carol. “The Treasure of Comanche County.” The New York Review of Books, vol. 52, no. 16, 2005, pp. 41–44.
• Owens, Barcley. Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. University of Arizona Press, 2000.
• Peebles, Stacey. Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen. University of Texas Press, 2017.
• The New King James Version. HarperCollins, 1982.
• Sickels, Robert C, and Marc Oxoby. “In Search of a Further Frontier: Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 43, no. 4, 2002, pp. 347–359.
• Wallach, Rick. “Theater, Ritual, and Dream in the Border Trilogy.” Southwestern American Literature, vol. 27, no. 1, 2011, pp. 21-36.
• Woodward, Richard. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York Times, 19 April 1993.