May 2013

Cryptonomy, Revenants, and All the Pretty HorsesStephen Tatum

I’ve known people to spend their lives nursing a hatred

of phantoms and they were not happy people.

--Alfonsa, in All the Pretty Horses (241)

He [John Grady Cole] must have appeared to them someapparition

out of the vanished past because he jostled the other withhis

elbow and they both looked. (All the Pretty Horses 287)

1. An Uncanny Economy of Revenance

Like many readers, I was drawn initially to Cormac

McCarthy’s novels because—to make an understatement--of the

author’s nuanced, compelling diction and figurative modes of

expression, especially his use of similes that relayed the

ontological and epistemological dilemmas accompanying his

characters’ journeys on the road. Re-reading All the Pretty

Horses twenty years after its initial publication, I find

myself--this time around—paying attention to various words

and phrases that, taken together, create a semantic network

which previously had escaped my attention: “paying

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proposition”; factura; tender; deal; reckon; “a sheaf of

bills”; dollars and pesos and centavos; sightdrafts; bill of

sale; bonds; toll; “fixed standard in commercial societies”;

invested; price; save; “common enterprise”; resources;

wealth; larceny; “this piece of business”; liable; pledge or

pledged; void; value; equity; deficit; exact; redeemable;

sum; default; “a coin in a mint”; speculation.

And like many readers, I was also drawn initially to

McCarthy’s Border Trilogy novels because of the author’s

evocative foregrounding, again through repetition and

figurative language, of certain topographies, both internal

and external. If my initial readings of All the Pretty

Horses were enthralled by McCarthy’s handling of, say,

prospect views of distant panoramas, my recent re-reading of

the novel tended to focus on the frequent appearance of

often barely-illuminated, nested or cellular interior spaces

of the human built environment, these typically reached by

characters’ who pass through doorway thresholds: the jail

cell in Encantada; the stone room with no windows in the

corner of the Saltillo prison; the corrals and the

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outbuildings and the main horse barn with its stalls at the

Hacienda de Nuestra Senora de la Purisima Concepcion ranch.

This topography has as its urban counterpart as well, such

as the narrow streets lined with low-rise buildings that

empty pedestrians into squares or small plazas--like the

intersection in Zacatecas of Calle de Noche Triste with the

Plazuela de Guadalajarita, also known as Pensador Mexicano,

that Alejandra and John Grady Cole visit during their last

day together (253). There are the receptacle-like spaces

found in the landscape, such as the above ground stonework

crypt in the Knickerbocker, Texas, cemetery where John Grady

Cole’s abuela is buried in the novel’s final chapter, or the

concrete water troughs in the villages and the ranch

paddocks. There are the stone tinajas and the deep arroyos and

ravines crossed by riders, these at times lined with

traprocks whose shallow basins, hollowed out by erosion,

occasionally hold water that is said to reflect, like any

animal or human eye, the complementary containing vault of

stars overhead in the night sky (272). Moreover, there are

the enshrouded, partitioned-off enclave spaces formed by

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groves of trees ringing a waterway or lining a dirt road—

like the laguna in which John Grady and Alejandra consummate

their romance; like the clearing amidst a grove of ebony

trees that Jimmy Blevins is delivered to by his captors for

execution. And we should also note how this external

topography of nested, receptacle-like, or screened off

spaces marked by threshold crossings (from freedom to

imprisonment; from innocence to experience; from life to

death) is also replicated by various characters’ dreamwork,

as we see when Alejandra recounts her dream of a dead John

Grady, his corpse being carried in a funeral cortege through

the narrow streets of an unknown city at dawn, both his

mother and Alejandra (“tu puta”) crying in its wake (252).

What in All the Pretty Horses binds together this

particular semantic network of words and phrases drawn from

the economic sphere with these internal and external

topographies that the novel foregrounds through repetition

on scales ranging from the human (the imagery of hearts and

eyes; of dreams) to material objects (e.g., Jimmy Blevins’

boot; the crook of a neck or elbow), to the human-built

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environment (plazas and jail cells), and on to the formal

shapes taken or composed by earth, water, and sky? What

might be said, in short, to mediate or explain the

convergence of economic and topographical concerns in the

Border Trilogy’s first novel?

I want here to begin answering such questions by

drawing attention to the novel’s passages that serve as

epigraphs to this essay. For as these epigraphs’ diction or

phrasing referring to “phantoms” and “some apparition out of

the vanished past” underline, All the Pretty Horses is,

among many things, a novel marked by the theme and imagery

of haunting and being haunted. Phantoms and ghosts, as

Alfonsa’s words disclose, can be said--and seen--to return

from the dead as revenants haunting the novel’s post-World

War II present; or, as the narrator’s image describing John

Grady’s appearance toward the novel’s end indicates,

apparitions or specters exist in this novel’s present moment

as one of the living dead. Writing in another context about

the Gothic themes and tropes in what she calls Jacques

Derrida’s “ghost writing,” Jodey Castricano notes how the

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theme of the revenant bears a certain, if not also special,

relation to economy. This is not only because the English

word “revenant” relates to the word “revenue,” but also

because of its etymological linkage with the French verb

“revenir,” meaning “to come back” (not only a return, say,

as a haunting but also as a return on an investment) or “to

amount to” something (10-11). On one level, this linkage

would seem to be relevant to All the Pretty Horses given

Alfonsa’s quandary regarding John Grady’s romance with

Alejandra, that of determining whether John Grady will

“amount to” something, which is to say whether he will

become (and remain) in the end “a person of value” (235). On

another level, this etymological linkage of a return of the

dead as well as a return on investment would seem to be

highly relevant for this novel whose episodic plot gets

propelled, in both its Texas and Mexico settings, by such

issues as primogeniture and inheritance, genealogy and

indebtedness.

Thought about through the lens provided by the

conjunction of revenant/“revenir,” then, the novel’s

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semantic network and its imagery of phantoms and apparitions

or ghosts composes what might well term, following

Castricano’s lead, an “uncanny economy of revenance” (11).

We can glimpse the particularly “uncanny” nature of this

economy precisely because of the novel’s periodic stress on

haunting repetitions and returns both at the level of theme

and also formal design (plot, structure, tropes, imagery).

In addition, I want to explore here how this uncanny economy

of revenance in All the Pretty Horses materializes not only

in its Gothic-like themes of inheritance and its imagery of

haunting, but also by considering its topographical,

corporeal, and linguistic or stylistic forms of encrypted

space. These analogues for the architectural crypt that

holds the remains of the dead, as we shall see, effectively

merge specters and spectrality with specularity and

speculation. Ultimately coalescing in the representation of

John Grady’s dreamwork, the novel’s overall uncanny economy

of revenance produces an intrapsychic crypt that entombs a

“secret,” one whose exposure both provides the novel with a

subterranean principle of cohesiveness and a fuller

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understanding of John Grady’s melancholia, or failed

mourning.

2. Corporeal Cryptography

The closest bonds we will ever know are bonds of grief. The deepest community one of sorrow.

--Alfonsa, All the Pretty Horses (238)

In the penultimate scene of All the Pretty Horses, John

Grady Cole rides his horse Redbo and leads the Blevins horse

to the Knickerbocker, Texas, Catholic cemetery in order to

witness his abuela’s funeral. On this cool and windy day a

funeral procession of a few cars and trucks and a Packard

hearse pulls up in front of the cemetery. While he watches

with hat in hand from across the narrow blacktop road “a

priest and a boy in a white gown ringing a bell” conduct the

burial rites. Only after all the mourners and then the two

local men tasked with filling her gravesite with dirt depart

does he cross the road and then walk up “into the cemetery

past the old stonework crypt and past the little headstones

and their small remembrances.” Shifting his gaze once to

consider “[t]he rolling parklands beyond, the wind in the

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cedars,” he eventually stands “over the unmarked earth” of

her cemetery plot. His own “small remembrance” of his dead

abuela here proceeds first via a memory trace that focuses

on her life-long care for the Grady family, from “the wild

Grady boys who were his mother’s uncles and who had all died

so long ago” to his mother’s father, the Grady patriarch and

grandfather who represents the first man to die in the

family’s ranch house that was originally built in 1872. As

this brief scene concludes, he softly calls her “his

abuela,” says his farewell to her in Spanish, turns his “wet

face to the wind,” and then, as the narrator describes the

scene, holds “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. . . “ (300-01).

With regard to the novel’s overall episodic structure,

this penultimate scene binds together the novel’s concluding

moments with its parallel opening scene involving the

funeral of John Grady Cole’s maternal grandfather, whose

Grady surname “was buried with that old man the day the

norther blew the lawn chairs over the dead cemetery grass”

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(7). In the wake of that first funeral, McCarthy’s narrator

describes John Grady riding ”out near sunset on the

westernmost section of the ranch,” dismounting on “the crest

of a low rise,” and--while contemplating a bleached horse

skull he holds in his hands--as standing there “like a man

come to the end of something” (5). In the funeral scenes

that open and close the novel, we see John Grady exposed to

the elements, as if the relentless motion of the cold wind

over the rolling prairie’s low grass provides an objective

correlative for his belated recognition of time’s inexorable

passage, of the fact of human (and animal) finitude

materially represented by unmarked grave plots. Hence the

horse’s skull, which underlines at the outset how his

exposure to the elements is at the same time an exposure to

the matter (and ultimate fate) of all things, as well as to

things that matter to him. Hence McCarthy’s narrator

focalizes John Grady’s gaze, as he walks through the

Knickerbocker cemetery toward his abuela’s gravesite, on an

above-ground stone crypt, on some of the cemetery

headstones’ family names, and on such “remembrances as china

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and chipped milk glass vases, a china crane, sun faded paper

flowers, “a broken celluloid Virgin” (300). Frail and

brittle, such chipped and broken and faded human-made

matter, along with the serial list of names on headstones,

exist only ephemerally in John Grady’s consciousness, get

registered here simply in notational form, as an itemized

list. Unscrolling in serial fashion prior to any judgment,

comment, or interpretation of value, McCarthy’s particular

narrative and linguistic strategies combine to produce a

rather spectral architecture of abandonment, one whose

material traces—the mute mementos or relics of the dead who

lie in crypts above and below the earth--seemingly will get

absorbed into the setting of human history and the earth.1

For as John Grady stands over the mounded-up, material

residue of fresh earth that marks his abuela’s gravesite,

this final funeral scene morphs into an affective scene of

mourning: the heretofore predominant energies of narration

and description metastasize from the merely local and

notational “here”-- church property demarcated by a fence

and gate within a surveyed geopolitical site called

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Knickerbocker, Texas--to the expansive “there” of an

“unmarked earth” now regarded as signifying “oblivion.” In

the end, John Grady’s sighting the gravesite’s newly

upturned prairie earth, unmarked by a headstone or grave

marker, undoes his bodily and, so it seems at this moment,

his mental composure. So the narrator focuses John Grady’s

affective response on “what overflows the face” (Abel 37):

his streaming facial tears; his gesture of holding out his

hands “as if to steady himself,” this momentary physical

vertigo interpreted by the narrator through three successive

“as if” similes. Though literally “unmarked,” then, the

abuela’s gravesite ultimately constitutes a paradoxical1Notes

? This essay builds on my earlier discussion of “spectrality” as theme, image, and trope emanating from a “forensic aesthetics” evident in recent western American literary and televisual productions. See Tatum, “Spectral Beauty and Forensic Aesthetics,” which begins with a readingof John Grady Cole’s sunset ride in the opening sequence of All the Pretty Horses, highlighted by the unprepared for entrance of the Comanche “nation and ghost of nation” sequence, in order to define the key features of a forensic aesthetic. My re-reading of All the Pretty Horses here is also generally informed by Eric Santner’s thoughts on the “spectral materialism” he discusses in W.G. Sebald’s writings (see 47-53).

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space, simultaneously marking an absence (to sight) and a

presence (to mind)—just as do the other gravesites with

their headstones, as well as the “small remembrances” whose

containing or receptacle shapes encrypt the dead’s presence

in miniaturized, material analogues of the old above-ground

stone crypt he first regards when entering the cemetery.

The point I want to make here is that these “small

remembrances,” these singular names on headstones, and John

Grady’s cumulative memories and thoughts epitomize how--

through the work of mourning--the dead “must be detached

from their remains so that their image finds its place in

the afterlife of the imagination” (Harrison 148). His

reaching out with his hands “as if to steady himself”

resembles a kind of conjuring act, one that desires to

separate out the mortal remains from the phantasmatic

imagination so as to transport the dearly departed abuela

beyond the boundary demarcating the living and dead. Indeed,

when the narrator further interprets John Grady’s

vertiginous gesture of hands “as if to bless the world,” we

are summoned as readers to consider how a vital contract of

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mutual indebtedness between the living and the dead exists

and is activated by the work of mourning. From this

perspective, John Grady’s initial, brief reflection about

his abuela’s history with the his family introduces the

utopian hope that perhaps this particular grief-exposed

subject will discover--in the presence of this cemetery’s

spectral artifacts of the dead, its “small remembrances”--a

renewed sense of biological and narrative continuity into

which he can insert oneself and, presumably, find some

degree of solace. Nevertheless, it also remains the case

that from this perspective, John Grady’s bestowal of

blessings, and hence meaning or significance on the world,

can be said effectively to transform his abuela into one of

the undead—a human being literally dead, to be sure, but

nevertheless one who remains symbolically alive in both his

imagination and his memory, hence a potential revenant (see

Santner 17).

So then, it is not so much that every journey on the

road takes place, as the gypsy in McCarthy’s The Crossing

says to Billy Parham, “in the company of the dead” (413), as

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that such journeys as John Grady’s between the opening and

closing funeral scenes in All the Pretty Horses occurs

rather in the company of “the undead,” the archeological and

apparitional traces of which get deposited in or

materialized by such things as bones, photographs, corridos,

painted portraits, monuments, souvenirs or mementos, crypts,

memories, and dreams that--in the manner of the uncanny--

return to haunt the living who inhabit a world that “seemed

to care nothing for the old or young or rich or poor or dark

or pale or he or she. Nothing for their struggles, nothing

for their names. Nothing for the living or the dead” (301).

As the final two sentences of this Knickerbocker graveside

scene’s concluding paragraph extend themselves horizontally

in discursive space via their recursive syntax and their

repetitions of the key word “nothing,” the rather abstract

simile announced in the novel’s opening funeral scene about

John Grady seeming to have come “to the end of something”

gets transformed here, at novel’s end, into an inexorable,

rhythmic descent into the nothingness of death itself.

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This lyrical conclusion to the novel’s penultimate

scene thus memorializes John Grady’s trauma of loss through

balanced phrase fragments whose binary oppositions are

introduced, only to then be annulled by the recognition of

our shared mortuary fate—this fate literally conveyed not

only by the unmarked earth of her gravesite, but also by the

blankness of the white page break that follows on the

passage’s final word “dead.” The rhetorical effect here of

these cadenced repetitions and returns is to produce a sonic

space of containment housing the living and the dead within

the boundaries carved out by the repeated word “nothing,” a

linguistic or stylistic crypt that offers an analogue both

of the stonework crypt in the Knickerbocker cemetery and the

narrator’s translation of John Grady’s affective state into

a corporeal cryptography sketched by his outreached hands.

3. Cryptonomy

He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formlessparasitic being

seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubateand he thought

he knew what made one liable to its visitation. (All the Pretty Horses 256-57)

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As various critics have noted, at the center of Cormac

McCarthy’s fiction is history’s collective trauma—the “greed

and foolishness and a love of blood” that the Duena Alfonsa

in All the Pretty Horses enumerates during her final

conversation with John Grady Cole as “[w]hat is constant in

history” (239). As her use of the word “constant” signals,

the historical trauma that cores the heart of McCarthy’s

novels manifests itself through an uncanny, chronic

repetition of violent events that transpire within (or

themselves produce) cordoned-off topographies of abandonment

and ruin (derelict cemeteries; deserted estancias; and ruined

churches) and whose enduring effects are registered by the

novel’s repetitive clustering of “blood” imagery haunting

the various characters’ waking and dreaming moments. And of

course, what is “constant in history” leaves its traces on

corporeal bodies, too, for as the Duena Alfonsa also points

out during her first extended conversation with John Grady,

“[s]cars have the strange power to remind us that our past

is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten,

can they? (135). In this first meeting between John Grady

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and Alfonsa, during which they play chess while conversing

and drinking hot tea, her claim about the power of bodily

scars to provoke remembrance closely follows on her correct

“guess that the scar on [John Grady’s] cheek was put there

by a horse” (135). But by novel’s end, as an encampment of

Indians watch at sunset this pale rider “vanish upon that

landscape solely because he was passing” (301), John Grady’s

serial trauma as recounted in All the Pretty Horses includes

the passing away of his grandfather and father, as well as

of his abuela; the assassination of Jimmy Blevins; his

killing of the cuchillero in the Saltillo prison; the loss of

his family home and, speaking more generally, the loss of

what he calls “my country” (299); and, of course, the loss

of his relationship with Alejandra.

Prior to her later departure that day at the train

station in Zacatecas, Alejandra tells John Grady she cannot

marry him, though she loves him still. At this pivotal

moment he “felt something cold and soulless enter him like

another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly . . .”

(254; emphasis added). The next day, while camping in a

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field on his northward journey of return to Texas, watching

“stars trace the arc of the hemisphere and die in darkness

at the edge of the world,” and lying there with “the agony

in his heart like a stake,” he once again imagines “the pain of

the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the

warmth of human souls wherein to incubate . . .” (256;

emphasis added). Through the narrator’s similes representing

John Grady’s serial, affective response to Alejandra’s

departure from his life, we are to understand, for starters,

that he cannot yet name—as the diction of “something” and

“formless” suggests—the deep-seated dread that now has

placed his subjectivity in disarray. More importantly, when

the narrator conceptualizes John Grady’s imagining of his

psyche as a sort of corporeal holding container within which

a newly-traumatized, “formless and parasitic” psychic double

“incubates” its being, we are to understand further how his

affective response to the pain of traumatic loss signals an

intrapyschic splitting of the subject. And precisely because

the narrator’s three embedded similes represent this cleft

in John Grady’s psyche more specifically as a form of

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vampirism or cannibalism, we can further detect how this

intrapsychic splitting here discloses the novel’s overall

investment in what might be called a “corporeal

cryptography” produced by traumatic loss (Schwab 99).

As “an ‘artificial unconsciousness lodged like a

prosthesis, a graft in the heart of an organ, within the

divided self” (Rand, “Foreword” to The Wolf Man xiii), the

intrapsychic crypt offers an objective correlative of

trauma, constituted as it is from the memories of words,

scenes, and affects associated with a lost object, thing, or

person of value, and then buried alive, and hence preserved,

inside the split or doubled human subject “like the living

dead” (Schwab 99)--or what I termed, in my earlier

discussion of the novel’s concluding cemetery scene, like

the return of the undead. As Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok

have theorized, the intrapsychic crypt produced by trauma

comes complete with its “own topography,” exists as “an

enclave” space between the dynamic unconsciousness and the

ego (whose very function they liken to that of “a cemetery

guard”), in which are entombed certain “secrets” that

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otherwise would overwhelm the bereft subject’s consciousness

(The Shell and the Kernel 130; 159). Thought about as a

psychological defense mechanism spatialized as an enclave

space like a sepulcher or vault, then, the intrapsychic

crypt marks a cleft or splitting in psychic space. However,

Abraham and Torok’s point about such “secrets” entombed in

the intrapsychic crypt is that--in a manner similar to the

haunting, uncanny return of the repressed to consciousness

that Freud theorizes--such encrypted “secrets” nevertheless

do manifest themselves through certain repetition

compulsions: a) through repeated bodily poses or physical

mannerisms; b) and through an architectonics of the crypt

that centers on labyrinthine or recessed, cellular and

compartmentalized or partitioned spaces; on hollowed-out

receptacle spaces such as those composed by niches or

cavities, pits or holes, the body’s orifices and eyes, its

chambered heart.

Moreover, as Abraham and Torok argue based on their

clinical experience, there is a third way that the

intrapsychic crypt formed in the wake of trauma manifests

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itself: through “gaps in or deformations of language: in

incoherencies, discontinuities, disruptions, and

disintegrations of meaning or grammar or semantic or

rhetorical coherence” (Schwab 107). As Abraham and Torok’s

principal translator and editor observes, trauma effectively

produces a “psychic aphasia” which aims at disturbing or

subverting the expressive or communicative function of

language, effectively substituting an encrypted code or

cipher or rebus for the kind of symbolization that could

potentially lead the subject toward successful or resolved

mourning. (Rand, Introd. The Shell and the Kernel 8).

Defined by Abraham and Torok as “cryptonomy,” or concealment

in language, such self-censorship, dysfunction, or drive for

opacity or illegibility in language use is symptomatic of

the crypt’s overall preservative economy: its desire to

preserve and protect the encrypted secret, along with the

history of its origins and the conflicted emotions the

subject attaches to the lost object, thing, or person of

value. As a result, the encrypted traces of the “secrets”

occasioned by the originating traumatic loss emerge through

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the ellipsis, detour, or indirection fostered by certain

repetitively deployed rhetorical figures and tropes:

metaphor, metonymy; homophony; homonyms; puns, semantic

ambiguities and syntactical obfuscations. “This is not to

say,” Gabrielle Schwab points out, “that the use of these

rhetorical figures is always in service of a crypt” (107).

But it is to say that whether traceable through

proliferating silences or gaps in expression or through a

semantic contagion of the kind we experience with McCarthy’s

paratactic syntax or serial grammar, such rhetorical figures

and tropes can be and are mobilized for linguistic

encryptment when--in a manner similar to the logic and

dynamic of dream language—their function becomes that of

concealing (which means simultaneously revealing in

displaced form) the spectral traces of the subterranean,

entombed secrets preserved as a kind of living dead in the

intrapsychic crypt.2

In McCarthy’s fiction generally and in All the Pretty

Horses more specifically, the traces of the linguistic crypt

become visible, as we shall especially see in this essay’s

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next section, not only in the deformation or thwarting of

communicative meaning represented by John Grady’s dreamwork,

but also through McCarthy’s signature deployment of the

rhetorical figure of the simile. For just as the concealment

in language exemplified by cryptonomy nevertheless reveals

the encrypted traces of the “secret” spawned by trauma, so

too that form of the trope of metaphor we call the simile

simultaneously asserts an identity between two different

entities or realms of experience, even as it keeps their

palpable difference in view due to the presence of the

2 Thus implicit in the theory of cryptonomy and the notion of the intrapsychic “secret’ is the position that images andfigurative language in McCarthy’s novels, to quote George Guilleman, at times indeed “do contain a secondary level of meaning.” Guilleman is revising Dana Phillips’ contention that, at least in Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s use of “vivid similes” seems “designed to increase the intensity and accuracy of focus on the objects being described rather thanto suggest that they have double natures or bear hidden meanings.” (qtd. in Guilleman 242-43). Technically speaking,cryptonomy mediates these positions, arguing that the linguistic crypt entombs or hides a “secret,” thus containing a “secondary” or latent level of meaning. But at the same time, that said buried “secret” nevertheless is traceable, revealed via the kind of figurative language and syntactical distortion or ambiguity found in McCarthy’s novel that focus attention on the objects, events, and humanor animal beings being described.

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linking words “like” or “as” or “as if.” Now with the

context provided by cryptonomy in mind, let us return to

consider, once again, the simile that serves to represent

the trajectory of John Grady’s affective response to

Alejandra’s refusal of his marriage offer during their final

time together in Zacatecas. Let us recall how, while

watching the stars of the night sky from a prone position,

in his encampment in a field far from any village, John

Grady imagines “the pain of the world to be like some formless

parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and

he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitation”

(256-57; emphasis added). With its balanced clauses joined

by the conjunction “and” and with the added resonance

provided by the anaphora (“He imagined”; “he thought”), this

simile represents John Grady’s wounded interiority through

an image of bodily penetration by an external Other. For one

thing, this simile is noticeably more expansive than the

rather simple simile that immediately precedes this one,

“like a stake,” to describe the agony he feels in his heart

after Alejandra’s departure from his life. For another

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thing, we should note also how the architectonics of the

linguistic crypt materializes here in the form of a doubly-

nested space: this simile is itself embedded, like an

apposition, within the compound sentence’s initial main

clause; and, secondly, within this simile itself, the

spatiality announced by the adverb “wherein” and the

infinitive verbal form “to incubate” produces this

figurative equation of pain and a parasitic being not only

through the image of the body as a penetrated space, but

also through the image of the body as a holding container or

receptacle, one that, paradoxically, combines the features

of both a womb and tomb.

“Incubate”: thought about as a process as well a site

in which the application of heat fosters the growth or

development of some entity at the expense of another, the

word seems a particularly fitting choice for this simile’s

attempt to represent the nightmarish grief that weighs upon

and preoccupies John Grady’s being after Alejandra’s

farewell to him in Zacatecas, where he is said to watch her

train departing from the station “as if he himself were in

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some dream” (254). This developing image of some formless,

spectral being preying upon, and within, the aggrieved one’s

body (and consciousness) prompts us to recall how “incubate”

descends etymologically from the Latin word “incubare,”

literally meaning “to lie upon.” In the context here of a

simile whose own nested spatiality is bound up with

corporeal cryptography (the body as penetrated host; the

body as breeding ground; the body as space of entombment)

“incubate,” I want to suggest now, linguistically encrypts

the trace of another word sharing this same Latin root

incubare: “incubus,” that fabled imaginary spirit or

apparition said to descend on sleeping persons, especially

women, at night for the purpose of sexual intercourse. A

descent by a spectral figure that might also be termed a

“visitation,” to cite the word that concludes the second

main clause of the compound sentence in which this simile

appears. Encrypting “incubus” within its semantic chaining

together of “incubate” and “visitation,” the simile thus can

be seen to mark the uncanny, haunted return to John Grady’s

consciousness of one specific past cause of his present

27

sorrow and grief: the illicit, concealed/revealed recent

history of Alejandra’s visitation to him in his bunk within

the horse barn at the La Purisima ranch “for nine nights

running” (142).

On one level, then, the simile McCarthy’s narrator uses

to represent John Grady’s affective state epitomizes how his

trauma produces a psychic crypt whose cryptonymic simile

functions to preserve and protect his memory traces of

Alejandra. So it is that while prone in his bunk in the

Saltillo prison while recovering from his knife wounds the

crypt’s preservative economy emerges when he “would not

think about Alejandra because he didn’t know what was coming

or how bad it would be and he thought she was something he’d

better save” (204; emphasis added). Nevertheless, traces of

his psyche’s investment in this “secret” yet materialize

through a simile whose cryptonomy here, as we have seen,

centers on “to incubate” and its Latin root “incubare,”

meaning “to lie upon.” Now ”to lie” in one direction of course

connotes the act of lying down or reclining--the bodily

position John Grady occupies at this moment in his isolated

28

camp in a Mexican rural field at night, and the bodily

position he and Alejandra presumably enact when consummating

their affair at La Purisima. But on another level, if we

regard the novel’s linguistic crypt as operating not only

through its similes but also through the concealment

provided by homonyms, then “to lie” of course also signifies

to speak falsely, to convey a false impression, to engage in

subterfuge through prevarication or utter fabrication or

deceit.

Returning by these steps to the encrypted presence in

McCarthy’s simile of “incubare,” then, the complex secret of

John Grady’s psychic ambivalence becomes more visible: not

just the trauma of losing his beloved through an aunt’s

interdiction and Alejandra’s nascent fear of losing her

father’s love, but also the proliferating trauma of

betrayal. When the nude Alejandra, whose pale skin makes her

appear within the laguna’s dark water “like the moon that

burned cold,” turns her face toward John Grady and utters

“Me quieres?” the narrator focalizes John Grady’s affective

response as feeling “[s]weeter for the larceny of time and

29

flesh, sweeter for the betrayal” (141). However, by chapter

4, when in Zacatecas he “feels something cold and soulless

penetrate him like another being,” his felt betrayal is

neither sweet nor limited to Alejandra herself. There is his

additional sense of having betrayed a father and family, a

friend, Blevins, his “country” and himself. So it transpires

30

that in the wake of Alejandra’s departure from him in

Zacatecas, he “remembered things from the night of whose

reality he was uncertain” (255), because of his drunkenness.

One of those things he seems to remember from that night,

however, is what appears to represent his projection of, and

belated farewell to, an imago of his idealized psychic

3 Guilleman usefully discusses the subtext of the kid’s melancholia in Blood Meridian with reference to Julia Kristeva’s theory of “abjection” and the Lacanian notion of the split subject (Guilleman, 253). From the perspective of cryptonomy, John Grady’s split subjectivity and abjection following on the personal and collective traumas the novel represents illustrate what Abraham and Torok term “incorporation,” where the subject’s melancholia results from the failure or refusal to mourn, in the grief process creating instead a linguistic crypt (as in McCarthy’s narrator’s use of similes), which constitutes an analogue ofthe psychic crypt holding the entombed “secret” captive, this traumatic residue buried yet alive as a kind of living dead (“The Wolf Man’s Magic Word” 16-17).

(see Zizek, “Melancholy and the Act” 657).

Works Cited

Abel, Elizabeth. “Skin, Flesh, and the Affective Wrinkles of

Civil Rights Photography.”

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 20

(Spring/Summer 2012):

35-69.

31

double, an imago who will the next day be substituted for by

an introjection of “some formless parasitic being”: “a man

in silhouette at the end of a street . . . half turned in

farewell, a coat slung loosely over one shoulder. Who’d come

to ruin no man’s house. No man’s daughter” (255).3

4. “. . . in the beauty of the world were hid a secret.”

32

They have a long life, dreams. Ihave dreams now which I had as a

young girl. They have an odd durability for somethingnot quite real.

Do you think they mean anything? She looked surprised. Oh yes, she said.

Dont you? Well. I dont know. They’re in your head.

(All the Pretty Horses 134)

In chapter 3 of All the Pretty Horses, John Grady Cole kills

a cuchillero by sinking his knife in the latter’s heart, then

snapping the knife’s handle sideways and breaking it off so

that the blade remains buried in the hired assassin’s chest.

Wounded by cuts to his arm and abdomen, blood both sloshing

in his boots and dripping between his outstretched hands,

John Grady is carried by Perez’s mayordomo across the

prison yard and into a “cinderblock house built into one

corner of the prison wall” just as the lights come on and

the prison’s emergency horn sounds (202-03; 184).

Eventually, he awakes in a nearby “stone room in total

darkness,” discovers his knife wounds have been bandaged,

and over the course of the three days to follow “he slept

and woke and slept again” (204), occasionally visited by a

33

demandadero who brings him liquids to drink. On the third

day of this iterative cycle of waking and sleeping, he lies

upon the bed in the dark room, “thinking of all the things

he did not know about his father, especially his father’s

experience during World War II in a Japanese prisoner of war

camp. Deciding not to think about Alejandra, he thinks

instead about horses, to his mind “always the right thing to

think about” (204). Someone, at some point during this third

day of recovery, turns on the room’s single overhead light,

and this time around, even with the light on

He slept and when he woke he’d dreamt of the dead

standing about in their bones

and the dark sockets of their eyes that were indeed

without speculation bottomed

in the void wherein lay a terrible intelligence common

to all but of which none

would speak. When he woke he knew that men had died in

that room. (205)

This dream of “the dead standing about in their bones”

is one of four dreams the narrator reports John Grady having

34

in the novel’s final two chapters. Framed initially by his

uncertain knowledge of his father’s wartime experience, and

then by his certainty (“he knew”) that men undoubtedly had

died in this crypt-like space in which total darkness

predominates, his dreamwork explicitly focuses on both

memory and the architectonics of the built environment, this

space secreted within the prison’s walls itself holding

traces of death and suffering. Earlier, in a dream recounted

in chapter 3 during his (and Rawlins’ and Blevins’)

imprisonment in “the small stone building” in Encantada

(157), John Grady imagines himself as running with horses in

springtime across a sunlit field of grass and blue and

yellow wildflowers “as far as the eye could see.” Here,

though, his dreamwork encrypts an encounter with the

haunting otherness of death through a metonymic transfer

from the human dead first imaged as “bones” or complete

skeletons, to an image of the dead reduced to the “dark

sockets of their eyes that were indeed without speculation.”

Whereas the earlier dreamscape was that of high plains and

mesas after a spring rain, conveying an affective sense of

35

an abiding “resonance” with the world (161), here his

dreamscape is “bottomed in the void.” Instead of the earlier

dream’s relay of an affective identification with the

world’s “resonance” (161), this dreamwork’s topography of

recessive, telescoped spaces—the standing dead’s empty eye

sockets get re-presented as a passageway toward a destitute

void space of emptiness—signals the presence of the psychic

crypt that entombs a “secret.” For as John Grady’s dreamwork

concludes, whatever “terrible intelligence common to all”

that there is of the world, whatever wisdom there is that

might be transmitted between the living and the dead—of this

“none would speak.”

In this dreamwork, then, the architectonics of the

psychic crypt materialize first via a recognition of being’s

absence or lack (“the standing dead”) then gets identified

via the contiguity of mortality with “bones,” or whole

skeletons, which then gets reduced to a part object, empty

“eye sockets,” which is to say sunken bodily cavities or

orifices that are emblematic of such other hollowed-out

topographies and material objects in the novel as clefts and

36

pits; pockets and pouches; pools and basins and bowls; cells

and crypts. In this dream, just as meaning, or the

attribution of significance to events cannot be communicated

through speech (“none would speak”), so too the blindness

accruing from the spectral dead’s empty eye sockets marks

how John Grady’s haunted projection of the spectral dead

neither can nor will be returned: “the dark sockets of their

eyes were indeed without speculation,” the narrator states,

bottomed as they are in the oblivion of death. “Without

speculation”: as is the case with the “eyeless and naked”

dead colt he comes across while riding later out of a draw

on La Purisima (225), as well as with the case of the

Indians in the novel’s final scene who stand “watching him”

pass and vanish, “into the darkening land, the world to

come” with “no curiosity about him at all” (301-02), so too

the standing dead here do not contemplate or consider him or

anyone else, much less conjecture about his appearance, or

about the history of his journey.

Now “the dark sockets of their eyes” both reveals an

encrypted space (“sockets”), and also, through the

37

syntactical distortion provided by the prepositional phrase

“of their eyes,” McCarthy’s phrasing effectively binds

together in a semantic chain spectrality (the dream itself) and

specters (“the standing dead”) with the specular—as in the motif

of gazing; as in the reflected, specular images in a dream

that might be regarded as having the reflective properties

of a mirror through the psychological motif of projection.

Furthermore, embedded in this key phrase’s center is a

syntactical ambiguity that, like the prepositional phrase

“of their eyes,” suggests the volatile indeterminacy

associated with this figurative representation of John

Grady’s affective mood state: is it, for instance, the “dark

eye sockets” or is it, instead, “without speculation” that

is imagined to be “bottomed in the void”? Now one

consequence of this syntactical ambiguity is to delay the

reader’s horizontal progression through the linear

sequencing of words, thus forcing a return and a rereading

so as to adjudicate the syntactical relations being

forwarded by the phrasing here. The point is that regardless

of how one adjudicates the syntactical relations being

38

forwarded here, additional stress gets placed on the

dreamwork’s seeming key word “speculation.” When considered

to mean the prominence of the gaze of recognition or, as I

noted above, of misrecognition leading to noncommunication

(“none would speak”)—the word “speculation” condenses for us

the dreamwork’s matrix of spectrality, specter, and the

specular.

“Speculation” of course also can signify financial

transactions involving some risk, and with this connotation

in mind, we now can begin to recognize how the “secret’

encrypted in the dreamwork here reveals the convergence of

psychology (unconscious dreaming and the anxiety of death)

and epistemology (“terrible intelligence”) with the

lingering questions of contract, indebtedness, and

investment that characterize an uncanny, haunted economy of

revenance. With all this in mind, we should recall that

connotations of the word “eye” also include the financial or

economic sector. “To eye” something means to appraise or

estimate, to calculate and estimate some object’s or thing’s

value--to engage, in short, in a form of speculation about

39

value, which is precisely what Rawlins thinks is proceeding

when he asks John Grady, following on the latter’s first

conversation with the Duena Alfonsa, if having “eyes for

[Don Rocha’s] daughter” means, at bottom, the same thing as

having “eyes for the spread” (138-39). In this expanded

semantic context that binds together psychology and

epistemology with the haunted economy of revenance, then,

where the formation of the crypt in John Grady’s dream in

the Saltillo prison centers on the translation of the

cryptonym “speculation” (and its cognate words that it

encrypts: “specter,” “spectral,” and “specular”) into an

image of dark eye sockets, we should also consider further

the final word “void” in this dreamwork representation. If

thought about as also signifying “to nullify” or “to annul”—

as in the expression “null and void”—then the presence of

“void” here suggests that the “secret” encrypted in John

Grady’s dreamwork is connected on some level with the

language of contracts, which is to say the language of

obligations, of exchange and indebtedness. A language

centering on a deferral of promises, one whose outcome might

40

be that of fulfillment or, as we saw earlier through the

cryptonym “incubate,” of default and betrayal.

This nexus of eye imagery, encrypted secret(s), and the

cryptonyms of an economy of revenance gets recycled in a key

scene from the novel’s chapter 4, in which the “terrible

intelligence common to all but of which none would speak” in

John Grady’s Saltillo prison dream morphs into his

recognition of the “terrible cost” attached to what he

understand to be the fundamental “secret” hiding in “the

beauty of the world” (282). After shooting a doe and

watching her die in the grass, John Grady thinks in serial

succession about the captain from Encantada, about Blevins,

and about Alejandra, which causes him to remember, in “the

cold blue cast” of the day’s dying light, both the first

time he saw her riding along the cienaga road and “the

sadness he’d first seen in the slope of her shoulders which

he’d presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing”

(282). Feeling “wholly alien to the world,” he

thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a

secret. He thought the world’s

41

heart beat at some terrible cost and the world’s pain

and its beauty moved in a

relationship of diverging equity and that in this

headlong deficit the blood of

multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision

of a single flower.” (282)

In the presence of the doe’s death, John Grady sifts through

his thoughts, a cognitive process that leads him to

recognize, somewhat belatedly, how all in the “world” are

unified by their shared mortuary fate, here emblematized by

the narrator’s figurative equation of the doe’s dead eyes

with those “things” among which she lies: grass, blood,

stones and the “dark medallions” on them composed by rain

drops.

Entwined here with his affective response to the trauma

of pain, loss, and death (the passage is organized by the

anaphora of “He thought”; “He remembered”; “he felt”), his

thoughts--triggered by his remembrance of Alejandra’s

corporeal embodiment of both beauty and sadness--shift in

kaleidoscopic fashion from the local and particular to an

42

emergent generalization about “the beauty of the world” in

which “were hid a secret.” John Grady’s interpretation of

the world’s encrypted “secret” proceeds through

condensation: first, the “world” of grass, blood, stone,

water, humans, and animals is represented via a synecdoche

for the human body, a beating heart; second, encrypted

within this body part as receptacle or containing space is a

“secret,” here decoded by John Grady as an economic or

dialectical materialist relationship between the world’s

beauty and pain. But whereas “equity” conceivably would

connote fairness or justice in a relationship through the

shared, equal distribution of proceeds, the additional

“secret” nested within the “secret” composed by world’s

dialectic of beauty and pain is rather that of inequity.

Hence the language of “terrible cost” and “headlong deficit”

in which, as the metaphor unfolds, any realizable, specular

aesthetic value or profitable return (“the vision of a

single flower”) requires or compels (“exacts”) an excessive

expenditure or investment (“the blood of multitudes”)--as if

43

McCarthy here is channeling one of Walter Benjamin’s theses

on the philosophy of history.

4. “. . . nation and ghost of nation”

. . . and above all the low chant oftheir traveling song which the riders sang

as they rode, nation and ghost ofnation passing in soft chorale across that

mineral waste to darkness bearing lostto all history and remembrance like a

grail the sumof their secular and transitory and violent lives.

(All the Pretty Horses 5)

In the extended metaphor representing John Grady’s epiphany

in chapter 4 after he shoots the young doe, the trauma of

human history (“the blood of multitudes”) necessitates the

production of a corporeal crypt (heart) in which the world’s

“secret” is entombed. With the narrator’s phrase “the blood

of multitudes” signaling an expansion of scale beyond that

of the privatized individual, this figurative embodiment of

“the world” through the synecdoche of the beating heart also

can be seen to provide a metaphor for the temporal and

material progression of human history. Thus, a lexicon keyed

here to an economy of revenance (“cost”; “deficit”;

“equity”) and the haunting of John Grady’s psyche by the

44

uncanny return of both the named and nameless spectral dead,

both in his present memories and his past dreams, disclose

that the emergent “secret” encrypted in the world’s

constantly beating heart centers not only on an aesthetic of

“beauty” founded on the mutuality in specular and

spectacular consumption of both destruction and creation. As

disclosed by the verb which closes this passage, “exacted”--

meaning not only to require or compel but also to take or

make a claim, as in “to appropriate”--the “secret” entombed

in the novel’s architectonic or topographical, corporeal,

and linguistic forms of the crypt is bound up with

distributive justice. As if the “secret” hidden in the

world’s heart centers not only on the dialectical

relationship between beauty and pain or suffering, then, but

also on unresolved issues of indebtedness and of rightful

inheritance.

In the novel’s opening sequence, of course, in the

evening after his grandfather Grady’s funeral, John Grady

Cole rides out on the western fork of the old Comanche trail

that cuts through the ranch’s western acreage, and as “the

45

rose and canted light” of the sun’s declining rays shape the

trail before him “like a dream of the past” in which its

shadows become transformed into a visual tableau of a

Comanche “nation and ghost of nation” accompanying him on

his sunset ride. This tableau presenting a spectral

procession of Comanche people and their slaves is contained

or framed by two similes--one of which (“like a grail”)

introduces the first of what will be the novel’s repetitive

imaging of crypt-like containers, basins, or cavities—and

like the other sequences explored here attaches an economic

lexicon to revenance (“pledged”; ‘redeemable”; “sum”),

underlining the primary theme of blood sacrifice with the

language of contractual agreements, or of debts subject to

cancellation upon repayment and of collateral subject to

forfeiture. The narrator’s use of the second-person pronoun

(“you could see”; “you could hear”) creates a liminal,

ambiguous space of narration that hovers between personal

memory and impersonal history, thus creating an equally

liminal temporality that Marianne Hirsch in another context

calls “postmemory,” where at this threshold moment of sunset

46

the dead, the undead, and the living co-exist in an entirely

haunted, conjectural present moment composed of

simultaneous, yet uneven temporalities of the premodern and

the modern (qtd. in Santer xx-xxi).

What I want to stress here is that it is not only the

case that the geography and history of the Grady ranch is a

haunted and violent one, but also that the ghosts of those

disavowed in the colonial past remain unassimilated into the

national symbolic, supposedly “lost to all history and

remembrance,” like a grail. However lost or forgotten,

though, this simile centering on a hollowed-out concave

vessel connoting, among other things, the human journey

between womb and tomb is juxtaposed to the noun “sum,”

diction that--along with the passage’s words “pledged” and

‘redeemable”—encrypts the trauma of borderlands history, of

an inheritance made forfeit during the formation of the

nation state, as an economy of revenance. So it is, as

Slavoj Zizek has noted, that often the dead return from the

grave to act as “collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt”

(qtd. in Castricano 15), an indebtedness we can define more

47

specifically, in the context of the Border Trilogy, of an

unfilled contract associated with the violence of colonial

appropriation of indigenous lands. So it is, as Abraham and

Torok theorize, that a matrix of transgenerational haunting

and indebtedness materialize in such “phantoms” as this

Comanche ghost nation, revenants who “were denied the rite

of burial or died an unnatural, abnormal death, were

criminals or outcasts, or suffered injustice in their

lifetime” (The Shell and the Kernel 165). Hence the

appropriateness of this opening sunset passage’s somewhat

agitated movement, its sudden swerve to mark the uncanny

return of the Comanche “nation and ghost of nation,” its

visual and aural animation of a spectrality judged to be

“bearing,” like interest on any speculative endeavor, not

only the overall “sum” of their collective lives, but also,

in the final analysis, simultaneously revealed as a specular

bearing witness of--to conjure up one final time here the

etymology of “revenance”--the surplus, repressed remainder

of an entombed history that, materializing in spectral form

48

as an unresolved burden or unpaid debt, continues to exact

its toll on the living.

Between the novel’s opening and closing funeral scenes

and sunset rides, McCarthy’s spectral materialism embeds the

violent legacy of a human and natural history of destruction

via an architectonics of the crypt, whose concealed presence

in landscape or linguistic forms, in material artifacts, and

in human or animal corporeality is nevertheless revealed

through the novel’s simultaneous investment in an uncanny,

haunted economy of revenance. On one level, the novel’s

suturing together an economy of revenance with the

architectonics of the crypt discloses a subterranean

principle of coherence that binds together the novel’s

themes, images, and structure. On another level, the

repetitive haunted returns of ghosts and phantoms,

especially in John Grady’s dreamwork, destabilize

ontological and epistemological boundaries. As disclosed by

the cryptonym “incubate” in one of his dreams, John Grady’s

traumatized subjectivity is inhabited by Otherness, both

split internally (hence the novel’s deployment of images of

49

shadows and reflections or double figures) and saturated as

well by the unconscious of an ethnoracial Other (the

Comanche “ghost” nation), the “sum” of whose secular,

transitory and violent lives serves to disrupt the supposed

closure of meaning desired by official history. Hence, as we

have seen, the dissemination of similes and the mixing of

rhetorical figures in All the Pretty Horses operates under

the sign of catachresis, which is to say of indirection or

detour and the drive toward opacity rather than

transparency.

And so what the opening magical appearance of the

Comanche ghost nation, (as well as Alfonsa’s stories about

the Mexican Revolution and her history with the Madero

brothers) reveals is how the novel’s cryptonomy operates on

both individual and collective or historical scales. The

novel’s cryptonomy, its economy of revenance, its liminal,

topographic spaces, and its themes of inheritance and

dispossession evidence how All the Pretty Horses emerges as

a postcolonial Gothic imagining of borderlands history. The

larger point here would be that John Grady’s failed mourning

50

—his pose of post-imperial abject melancholia captured in

the novel’s final scene—conceivably ought to be regarded as

not just fostering a nostalgic lament for a lost “country,”

associated with his grandfather’s ranching tradition. But

rather a condition that relays a border epistemology, one

which holds that those who are on the margins of capitalist

modernization should not renounce their traditions through

the kind of accommodation and working through that

successful mourning symbolizes, but instead retain a

melancholic attachment to the very lost or endangered

cultural practices and traditions threatened by capitalist

modernization (see Zizek 657).

51

Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. The Shell and the Kernel:

Renewals of

Psychoanalysis. Ed., Trans. And Introd. by Nicholas T.

Rand. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1994.

----------. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Trans.

Nicholas Rand.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Castricano, Jodey. “Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques

Derrida’s Ghost Writing.”

Gothic Studies 2.1 (April 2000): 8-22.

Guillemin. “’See the Child’: The Melancholy Subtext of Blood

Meridian.” In Cormac

McCarthy: New Directions. Ed. James D. Lilley

(Albuquerque: University of

52

New Mexico Press, 2002): 239-66.

Harrison, Robert Pogue. The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago

and London: University of

Chicago Press, 2003.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Crossing. New York, Knopf, 1994.

----------. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin,

Sebald. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2006.

Schwab, Gabriele. “Writing against Memory and Forgetting.”

Literature and Medicine 25

(Spring 2006): 95-121.

Tatum, Stephen. “Spectral Beauty and Forensic Aesthetics in

the West.” Western

American Literature 41 (Summer 2006): 123-45.

53

Zizek, Slavoj. “Melancholy and the Act.” Critical Inquiry 26(Summer 2000): 657-81).

54