(1998) Cities of the Plain

The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.

Plot Summary

Cities of the Plain, the final novel in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, continues the stories of John Grady Cole (All the Pretty Horses) and Billy Parham, (The Crossing). Both men work together for Mac McGovern at the Cross Four cattle ranch outside of Orogrande, New Mexico. The main narrative follows John Grady’s love for and pursuit of Magdalena, a Mexican prostitute who suffers from epilepsy. Although convinced that John Grady’s pursuit of Magdalena is foolish, Billy’s loyalty moves him to help in John Grady’s efforts to free Magdalena from the White Lake brothel and Eduardo’s power. In an attempt to obtain enough money for marriage to Magdalena, John Grady sells his horse. Even though Billy acts as self-appointed mediator between Billy and Eduardo and offers Eduardo the money to buy Magdalena, Eduardo is unwilling to let Magdalena leave. Subsequently, John Grady creates a plan for both Magdalena’s escape and move to America to marry him. However, the plan is ruined when Tiburcio, Eduardo’s henchman, kills Magdalena. To avenge her death, John Grady confronts Eduardo in a long and brutal fight. John Grady is badly wounded, but ultimately kills Eduardo. After the fight, the wounded John Grady wanders the streets of Juarez until he is taken into a family’s home. Billy finds him the next day and John Grady dies shortly after. Billy carries his body back to America and the novel jumps to 2002. Billy is an old homeless man. While under an overpass he meets a fellow traveler who tells him of a dream. When the novel ends, a family has taken in Billy near his childhood home and the mother of the family tucks him into bed and tells him to sleep.

Critical Analysis

Taking place mostly in 1952, Cities of the Plain continues the stories of John Grady Cole and Billy Parham. Serving as the final chapter in the Border Trilogy, Cities is saddled with the task of unifying the first two books and bringing the entire trilogy to its end. Because it plays this role in the trilogy, Cities is rarely considered critically outside of the framework of the trilogy as a whole. Although Cities can appear inextricably bound to the two books preceding it, Cities was originally written as screenplay predating the other two volumes of the trilogy. There are significant differences between the screenplay and the published novel, but readers can still feel the book’s origins as a screenplay due to McCarthy’s use of dialogue rather than description. The continuation of the stories of John Grady and Billy makes it is difficult to write or think about Cities separate from ATPH and The Crossing. Although they are the same characters from the first two books of the trilogy, critic Edwin T. Arnold points out that Cities depicts a “diminished world […] a post-war West suffering through its final mockeries and subtractions, a world hard pressed for heroics and depending instead on simple decency [. . .] neither John Grady nor Billy has been spared by these diminishments” (222). Many critics focus on the men’s personalities and friendships in this changing world. Arnold describes the men’s personalities using the ideas of another critic: “Billy is in many ways the complete opposite of John Grady, who will not settle for second best. Dianne Luce distinguishes between John Grady as “ardent-hearted” and Billy as “broken-hearted” (233). Although these characterizations of John Grady and Billy may seem overly simple, they correlate with Charles Bailey’s reading of the Border Trilogy as a search for a new type of hero that can work in the new “diminished world.” Bailey reads the “ardent-hearted” John Grady as a heroic knight in the tradition of the courtly hero, who follows a strict and unwavering ethical code (294). Bailey also describes the “broken-hearted” Billy as a traditional tragic hero, likening him to Hamlet and Oedipus (295). Bailey attributes the ultimate ends of John Grady and Billy, one dead and the other almost completely forgotten by the world, to what he calls “the deconstruction of the entire trilogy:” “Heroism, no matter its form, is irrelevant in a world consumed in materialism and the instruments of its own destruction” (300). Although Bailey’s reading of Cities provides an interesting way of unifying the trilogy, it is not the only way to consider the text or the trilogy as a whole. Critic Kenneth Lincoln comments on McCarthy’s range of thought, “McCarthy has read the Greek Tragedians and the modern existentialists” (130). McCarthy’s influences and interests in the Border Trilogy are diverse and expansive. Discovering one way of approaching the text should not necessarily rule out the possibility of other readings. Another possible reason why Cities of the Plain is rarely written about apart from the Border Trilogy as a whole is the many connections among ideas in the three works. The Border Trilogy and many of McCarthy’s other works include characters that seem to speak as prophets promoting their singular view of the world. Although it does not seem like McCarthy is promoting the ideology of each of these prophets, they often speak with frighteningly persuasive language. Throughout the trilogy and Blood Meridian, there are many similarities in the rhetoric of prophetic characters. Edwin Arnold points out the similarity between the pimp Eduardo’s statement to Billy, “No man [gets what he wants]. Or perhaps only briefly so as to lose it. Or perhaps only to prove to the dreamer that the world of his longing made real is no longer that world at all,” (Cities 134, 135), and Alfonsa’s statement to John Grady in ATPH, “In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments. Those whom life does not cure death will. The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting” (238). It is possible that through finding these similarities in the prophets’ statements we can begin to discover some of McCarthy’s central concerns in the Border Trilogy. Drawing on Eduardo and Alfonsa’s congruent statements, Kenneth Lincoln remarks, “the crux of the story is whether men should dream a world for ever lost” (135). Cities of the Plain also connects to works outside of the trilogy. Edwin Arnold illustrates connections between Eduardo and Judge Holden, a central character in Blood Meridian. Eduardo tells John Grady as they fight, “In his dying perhaps the suitor will see that it was his hunger for mysteries that has undone him […] Your kind cannot bear that the world be ordinary. That it contain nothing save what stands before one” (Cities 253). Eduardo’s statement echoes Judge Holden’s admonishment to the gang: “Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery” (BM 252). Arnold extends this parallel between Eduardo and the Judge: “In killing Eduardo by stopping his mouth, his talk, his deceit, with his father's hunting knife, […] John Grady does what the kid fails to do to the judge.” Whereas the kid is ultimately destroyed by the Judge’s embrace, John Grady is picked up by Billy and returned to America “as Billy cries out for witness” to John Grady’s tale (Cities 231). “He was crying and the tears ran on his angry face and he called out to the broken day against them all and he called out to God to see what was before his eyes. Look at this, he called. Do you see? Do you see?” (Cities 261). Although Arnold uses Billy’s outcry to draw a parallel between Cities and Blood Meridian, bearing witness is also a theme in The Crossing. In his story to Billy, the Mormon expriest says, “Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could say the act is nothing the witness all. […] If the world was a tale who but the witness could give it life?” (154). It seems that Billy is calling out for a witness to John Grady’s life, as if the witness will give John Grady’s story validity and, according to the Mormon, “give it life.” Although it may be impossible to make sense of all the interconnections within the Border Trilogy, Arnold points out “What becomes clear in reading the complete trilogy is how thoroughly and complexly McCarthy uses repetition, not simply to retell the same story (for, as his characters so often say, all stories are one) but to create a deep resonance as each parallel story moves towards its inescapable conclusion” (232). Despite Arnold’s claims about inescapable conclusions, Cities of the Plain hardly seems to hint at the long and complex epilogue completing the novel. It can be difficult to stake any claims about this portion of the text that raises many questions and rather than concrete answers. Yet, as Edwin Arnoldpoints out, the epilogue closes the entire trilogy: McCarthy's conclusions are ambiguous and open-ended, mysterious shifts into alternate realities or into parables implying secret truths or gnosis. […] The almost thirty-page Epilogue to Cities of the Plain is the most elaborately conceived of these endings, for it concludes not only the novel but the trilogy itself and, moreover, comments on the totality of McCarthy's work. […] this Epilogue may be read as a deliberate meditation on the nature of artistic creation, the responsibilities and limitations of the creator, and the independent existence of that which is created. (239) While Arnold argues that the epilogue is a meditation on the uniqueness of artistic creation, McCarthy may also be commenting on the relationship between art and philosophy. This reading shed’s light not only on the epilogue, but also the role of the trilogy’s many prophetic philosophizers. Both the art of fiction and philosophy begin with a question and inquiry into something unknown. The traveler, the trilogy’s final philosopher, prophet, storyteller, claims, “This story like all stories has its beginning in a question. And those stories which speak to us with the greatest resonance have a way of turning upon the teller and erasing him and his motives from all memory. […] Where all is known no narrative is possible” (277). Both philosophy and storytelling are impossible quests and useless without a question to try to answer. And it is tales that answer the most difficult questions that we, the philosophers and storytellers, long to tell and to hear. by Flannery Mikusa