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“What the Hell Is a Flowery Boundary Tree?” Gunslinger, All the Pretty Horses and the Postmodern Western

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2012

JORDAN SAVAGE
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Abstract

What is the function of a map, and what role does mapping perform in a literary text? This essay interrogates the use of maps and mapping, the influence and impact of capital and the construction of nationhood, and considers what it means to be an American in Cormac McCarthy's All The Pretty Horses and Edward Dorn's Gunslinger. The argument links the project pursued in these two westerns to larger geopolitical issues, whilst fully addressing the specificity and difference of the texts and their individual forms, structures and contents. Postmodern geographical theory is applied to the two books to provide a new theory of the way that land and territory are employed in the western.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , November 2012 , pp. 997 - 1008
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Dorn, Edward, Gunslinger (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989), 29, original emphasisGoogle Scholar.

2 See www.bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm, accessed 1 July 2011.

3 de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

4 McCarthy, Cormac, All The Pretty Horses, in idem, The Border Trilogy (London: Picador, 1998), 1–306Google Scholar.

5 Dorn.

6 Doel, Marcus A., “Proverbs for Paranoids: Writing Geography on Hollowed Ground,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (1993), 377–394CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ibid., 380.

8 Dorn, 3.

9 Doel, 378.

10 McCarthy, 35.

11 Doel, 378, original emphasis.

12 McCarthy, 214.

13 Ibid., 38.

14 Doel, 381.

15 Ibid., 381.

16 McCarthy, 5.

17 Ibid., 26.

18 Ibid., 5.

19 Because the poem is concerned in part with pushing western generic signs beyond their accustomed remit, this concrete basis in one genre is tested in the later books of the poem. Although Gunslinger remains a western throughout, it is in the interest of this essay to discuss how generic conventions are established, and not their later permutations.

20 Dorn, 3.

21 Ibid., 7.

22 Ibid., 32.

23 Ibid., 17.

24 McCarthy, 33.

25 Ibid., 56.

26 Doel, 381.

27 Ibid., 377.

28 Dorn, 41.

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