Image from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
by Marcos Aburto
A cowboy rides off on a horse into the sunset: the iconic cinematic shot of the American West. The final ‘shot’ of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses is similar. But how can it be a shot when it is only words on a page? McCarthy’s novels have been hailed as cinematic experiences despite the obvious contradiction between their medium and alleged effect; thus, because the literary novel exists solely as words, in some way, McCarthy’s prose must be cinematic in itself. His unconventional use of simile alongside his esoteric choice of language creates vivid worlds that seem unrestricted by their medium. Such vividness can conjure an imagined image to rival the real representation—one to rival even a film perhaps. According to Gilles Deleuze, the image is the key element of film, but more specifically, the relationship among the elements of the image. These relationships dictate the way an audience perceives the second key aspect of cinema: time, or what Deleuze calls duration. Images, time, and relations between objects come together in his ideas of the movement- and time-image. The movement-image is made of reflexive actions, while the time-image is reflective—circumstances that do not allow for reflexive action. Similarly, All the Pretty Horses revolves around confrontation, reaction, and ultimately reflection on the past. John Grady’s fantasy of a Wild West drives him through each moment of the text. He is constantly attempting to escape the present; his flight is reflexive. But the most thematically potent moments in All the Pretty Horses come not when John Grady is fleeing from the present into a fantasy past, but when he is forced to confront and reflect on the truth of the past and the passage of time itself. These moments of reflection demythologize the West for John Grady and the reader. Through reflection, McCarthy invokes time, creating the text’s cinematic quality. All the Pretty Horses demonstrates the novel’s ability to utilize visual and durative elements akin to cinema; the text’s pictorial invoking of imagination, alongside McCarthy’s unorthodox syntax and prose, reveals similarities between All the Pretty Horses and Deleuze’s ideas of the movement- and time-image, ultimately illustrating how the book’s cinematics emphasize its themes of the inevitable passage of time through reflection on the Wild West.
McCarthy’s prose invokes imagination to create a mental image that can function as a cinematic image. Deleuze defines the (film) image as “the system of relationships between its elements”. More specifically, the image must “make perceptible [or rather] make visual” those relationships (Cinema 2, xii). Thus, the first and most obvious hurdle between the novel and its potential to be a cinematic experience appears: its form. The literary novel does not ‘exist’ with images, yet film is built on images. However, the experience of reading a novel has the potential to elicit mental images that could function similarly to a single frame of a film, thus producing a way to visually present the ‘relationship between its elements’. This realization comes in the form of imagination. In her paper “The Role of Imagination in Aesthetic Experience”, Anne Sheppard argues that “imagination is what enables us to see a picture… as a representation of something in the real world” (35). She furthers this argument starting with the Ancient Greeks’ close relationship between storytelling and the imagination: “the Greeks used the term phantasia—“imagination”—for the poet’s ability to visualize what he presents…[to] see the events… as if he were actually present” (36). This “vividness” was achieved through “successful realistic representation” (36). However, Mary Warnock (summarized by Sheppard) suggests an alternate imagination. In Imagination, Warnock suggests that an artist’s work does not “simply [represent] a scene or an event but [conjures] up an image that points beyond itself and so expresses something that cannot otherwise be readily expressed” (38).
This account of imagination better describes McCarthy’s style of writing—more specifically, his use of similes. Opposed to objective, realistic representations of things, McCarthy consistently opts for ‘vague-specifics’: moments in which he describes things with the combination of rhetorical distance (through lead-ins such as ‘like some’) in combination with an opposing yet specific depiction of reality. For example, as John Grady steps outside his home, he hears a train, stops, and waits for it. McCarthy describes it as
like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging (3-4).
The train functions as a single, simple object, but in the excessive description, the original noun is almost lost in the fray. The train’s simple objectivity becomes entangled with the subjective and symbolic imagery and meaning. McCarthy could have described the train simply as coming over the horizon with a brief analogous comparison (or opted to not use simile at all), but by utilizing simile to such an outstanding extent, McCarthy imbues the train with ideas that exist around and beyond it. While the environment situates the train in the material world, ideas such as light and dark (“satellite of the coming sun… mile on mile into the darkness”), as well as time and modernization (“creating out of the night the endless fenceline”) situate it in the immaterial (3-4). In his analysis of McCarthy’s prose, Lucas Thompson used a deconstructive process to better understand the recurring patterns and functions of McCarthy’s prose. Thompson’s rhetorical analysis notes McCarthy’s preference of “using simile—rather than metaphor—for the sentence’s final image, to reinforce the power of analogic, premodern thought”, as well as his “insistence on physical embodiment and material reality” (93). The physicality of the train shown through the vivid description works to illustrate the relationship the train shares with the environment around it. In addition, the symbolic description imbues the image with analogic, conceptual connotations. Consequently, McCarthy’s writing seems almost contradictory, wishing to exist through symbolic ideas as well as through physical existence. However, these are not contradictory but complementary. Sheppard states how this disjunction of tangible and intangible creates an “inadequacy”—a difficulty in conceptualization—which “stimulates the imagination of the reader to look beyond what is presented” (40). As such, the prose of All the Pretty Horses aligns with Warnock’s imagination as both physical and gesturing towards something not readily expressible. The ‘idea in limbo’ dovetails into Deleuze’s foundations for Cinema 1 and 2: Henri Bergson’s philosophical image.
In Matter and Memory, Bergson defines the image as “a certain existence which is more than that which the idealist calls a representation, but less than that which the realist calls a thing— an existence placed halfway between the ‘thing’ and the ‘representation’” (9). However, Bergson’s image truly refers to reality as a whole: “All seems to take place as if, in this aggregate of images which I call the universe” (18). The human mind is already predisposed to interpreting reality in images. In terms of All the Pretty Horses, imagination facilitates this idea of an image. Specifically, it is McCarthy’s combining of the literal and symbolic which invokes the imagination in the reader; the train is more than a direct representation of a train: it is embellished through description, and thus it becomes less than what ‘a realist’ would deem a train due to the imbued symbolic meaning. It is in-between: imagined. As Sheppard states, this stimulates the imagination, and it is thus able to turn the perception into an image. The imagined image works alongside Bergson’s real image. Imagination can facilitate an almost-reality, thus allowing for a cinematic experience while reading. McCarthy’s prose works to extend conscious perception into imagination. Thus, the novel can produce imagined images. However, these are not yet the cinematic image, as they lack two things: relation and time.
Through the use of extended sentence structure, McCarthy’s prose imitates the way cinema encapsulates time. Despite All the Pretty Horses’ ability to conjure images into mind, these images are not yet cinematic images. As aforementioned, Deleuze’s image requires not simply visible objects, but objects with a perceivable relationship to each other. As such, Deleuze takes two more terms from Bergson: duration and multiplicity. With the term ‘duration’, Bergson suggests that time is not perceived, but that movement is. Perceived movement divides time, and it is through these movements that people understand the ‘whole’—the ‘whole’ can be taken to mean everything in reality. To conceptually understand movement as translation, imagine a clock: as the second hand moves in multiple, equally-spaced segments, one can observe time because it is being divided by translation. Without the hand, one cannot observe time changing. Alternatively, Deleuze summarizes an example that clarifies movement as transformation: “Putting some sugar in a glass of water” and waiting until it melts (Cinema 1, 9). The “movement of translation” that mixes the sugar with the water “expresses a change in the whole” or a “qualitative change” of the water (9). The ‘movement’ does not positionally change—translate—the water or sugar, but instead puts it through a qualitative change—a transformation. Deleuze draws from this example that Bergson “wants to say… [the observer’s] waiting… expresses a duration as mental, spiritual reality” (9). Duration, or time, is then not measured by movement as translation, but is better represented by movement as transformation. Because everything is always interacting with itself, and thus, changing (transforming). Duration is the constant state of changing. This state depends on relations among objects. The second-hand registers transformation because the relations between it, the minute hand, and the numbers change as it moves. Deleuze states that “[relations] do not belong to objects, but to the whole… through relations, the whole is transformed… We can say of duration… that it is the whole of relations” (Cinema 1, 10). Time is built on relations and their ability to change; Bergson and Deleuze call this multiplicity. All the Pretty Horses must thus exhibit multiplicity in order to show time in the same way as a film: the “relationship between elements” (Cinema 2, xii).
A staple of McCarthy’s writing is his use of the word ‘and’, his sentences stretching far beyond conventional syntactic form. Thompson notes McCarthy’s use of “polysyndeton… to link sub-clauses… [giving] the [sentences] a chugging… rhythm” (90). John Grady’s field-of-horses dream that runs half a page in length best embodies the idea of relationships between elements:
THAT NIGHT he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wild-flowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold… (McCarthy 161).
Although only referencing half the passage, the way polysyndeton builds relations between objects is clear: the unabating sentence requires the reader to envision a continued sequence of causes and effects. McCarthy could describe the plain, the horses, and John Grady separately, however this would sacrifice the changing relation—the duration—between the objects. The unbroken sentence does not allow the reader to break apart the images. The ideas thus flow and change from beginning to end in the sentence more explicitly. The flowers best show the duration and multiplicity at play. The flowers exist first in the scene as newly bloomed: through the phrase “the spring rains had brought up” the sentence condenses the birth and blooming of a flower’s life into the sentence before the horses and John Grady ever arrive. Following that, the horses and John Grady run through the field; following that, they trample the flowers. The flowers exist in the sentence as both being birthed and slaughtered, but it is not instantaneous. The use of polysyndeton instills in the sentence movement, not as only translation, but as transformation. The flowers can be thought of as the sugar and the plains the water. In Deleuze’s response to Bergson, he considers adding a spoon to the example to speed up the sugar dissolution (Cinema 1, 9). John Grady and the horses serve the same purpose as the spoon. They speed up the process of the flowers’ (sugar’s) change in the environment (that being death or dissolution, respectively). Hence, All the Pretty Horses’ unorthodox syntax allows it to create duration in a similar conception to Deleuze. Therefore, the novel can elicit both the conception of images and the perception of time in seemingly cinema-like ways.
Seeing All the Pretty Horses through Deleuze’s movement-image emphasizes the text’s plot structure and themes of denial and escape. As shown previously, the novel alone regularly produces the ‘image’. These can be thought of as single moments of space. However, McCarthy’s prose is able to convert this into a ‘shot’: space and time together. Deleuze declares the shot “the movement-image…[in] so far as it relates movement to a whole which changes” (Cinema 1, 22). Simply, the movement-image is the visual changing of relations—movement as transformation, not only translation. Deleuze further explains the movement-image as composed of three parts: perception, affection, and action. Perception in film is the act of something being perceived; affection refers to the way in which a character is affected by the perceived thing; and, action is the reaction to the initial perception. Consequently, as shots are placed together, they form what Deleuze deems the ‘montage’: multiple individual shots stitched together, creating what we might colloquially call a ‘scene’. The montage constitutes a film. A film can then become a loop of events, thus occurring as conflicts that the characters perceive, are affected by, and then attempt to resolve through action: a ‘movement-image plot’. All the Pretty Horses illustrates this idea of the movement-image plot. John Grady’s story revolves around reactive action. When confronted with the fact that the way of life he dreams of having—to “run a ranch” (McCarthy 18)—is no longer feasible, he cannot live with the situation. Refusing to believe that “some things in this world cant be helped” (19), John Grady attempts to remedy the death of his dreams: he approximates his dream of the ranch hand life with the myth of the cowboy. The idea of chasing after the Western myth plagues John Grady throughout the novel, beginning before he even leaves. On his last ride with his father, the narrator remarks on John Grady’s need for the West. While his father mourns the world he once knew, the narrator states how “if [John Grady] were begot… into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them” (23). Without horses (but in a thematic sense, the Western lifestyle), John Grady “would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one”; only then would John Grady feel the “world to be right or he right in it” (23). John Grady’s sense of being lies in the dream of the West. His life is not a question of whether he will or will not adapt to the present: he cannot exist without the past. Because of this, he must run to the past when the future comes to him—he perceives the state of the present, he reacts by running. But this action is isolating, coming at the cost of his relationships. Because John Grady’s utmost impetus is fleeing from the state of the present, anything that does not directly aid or hinder his flight into the mythological past is secondary. Thus, when he is faced with the preservation of his relationships but at the cost of surrendering to the present, versus venturing alone into a mythical past, he responds “I’m already gone” (27). Chasing the past drives John Grady, not the threat of loneliness. Because his relationships do not resolve his perception-affection of the present, John Grady discounts them. Rawlins does join John Grady, but he remains unessential. John Grady’s stubborn pursuit continues into Mexico as he cannot seem to accept the truth of the situation he is in. He may acknowledge it, but he never concedes to it. Even after nearly dying in prison, when Rawlins surrenders to reality, recognizing that he himself must “[go] home”, John Grady refuses to. In that moment, he acknowledges Rawlins and reacts: “Don’t make no difference” he says (214). The morning after, he continues back into Mexico. The plot of All the Pretty Horses operates on this structure throughout, if not sentence by sentence, then moment to moment: John Grady perceives a situation, and then takes action in an attempt to escape the inevitable outcomes of his circumstance—he chases the cowboy. Because of his constant refusal to accept his reality, the perception-action cycles become repetitive and habitual. His denial carries him further into the cowboy delusion, separating him from all he knows. To chase the past, he must abandon the present. Hence, he deserts his family, Texas, and Rawlins, before finally abandoning himself in the final moments of the book. Through John Grady’s cyclical actions, All the Pretty Horses’ mode of storytelling reveals itself to embody the movement-image’s structure of perception-affection-action; this structure instills a repetitive nature in the plot, and establishes its themes of running from reality into the past.
Using Deleuze’s time-image emphasizes All the Pretty Horses’ subversion of structure and genre, ultimately revealing the effects of the novel’s cinematic aspects. Deleuze’s time-image differs crucially from the movement-image: in the movement-image, perception drives action, but in the time-image perception drives thought. Unlike the movement-image where characters are constantly reacting to things—as John Grady throughout the text—the time-image “is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent” (Deleuze, Cinema 2, 2); a character acts “in vain” as “the situation… “outstrips [their] motor capacities”, ultimately forcing them to “see and hear what is no longer subject to the rules of a response or action” (3). Characters are presented with situations wherein they cannot react or are unable to act outward. Thus, they must act inward; they are forced to reflect. The time-image as reflection subsequently encourages, for both the character(s) and the audience, a contemplation on the story’s repercussions and consequences. It is here that the time-image becomes applicable to All the Pretty Horses. John Grady’s journey ends with a symbolic ride off into the sunset, fully embodying the cowboy myth he has been chasing:
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 the horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come. (McCarthy 302)
Once again, McCarthy utilizes the polysyndeton, but more notably, the passage aligns with Deleuze’s term ‘any-spaces-whatever’. Any-spaces-whatever are crucial to the time-image, as they are spaces, settings, or backgrounds that do not stimulate any kind of movement or action. Without situational offerings, the time-image insists on reflection, on perception into thought rather than action. The desert functions for John Grady as an any-place-whatever, but more specifically, one where “the characters… are suffering less from the absence of another than from their absence from themselves” (Deleuze, Cinema 2, 9). Before entering this final page, he and the reader abandon any other sign of human life: the Indigenous figures who “stood and watched him pass and watched him vanish upon the landscape” (McCarthy 302). John Grady rides into the desert here without any prompting of the external world. Instead of running from physical situations, such as law enforcement, or running towards a goal, such as La Purísima, he rides without a goal into the horizon. He is not looking for the owner of Blevins’ horse, they have become “a single being” (302). The only motivation for him now is completely internal. John Grady also does not speak for the last three pages of the novel and the narrator refrains from informing the reader of his thoughts. Yet, the reader does not become wholly alienated from the story. The final passages force the reader to reflect alone alongside John Grady on “the world that [is] rushing away” (301). This is the effect of the time-image: it is thought filmed; it is reflection contemplated. In All the Pretty Horses these thoughts force the reader to reflect on the journey of John Grady, but more so, on the cowboy and the Western. John Grady’s final departure reveals the cowboy to be an isolating myth and the West to be an isolating place: he has lost all those around him, including himself, having become fully amalgamated with his delusion. This any-space-whatever subverts the previous structure of the plot: John Grady does not find resolution, but he also has nothing more to react against. By seeing the ending as a shift into a time-image rather than the resolution of a movement-image, one can understand the effect the novel has on the reader: a forced confrontation with the reality of both the past and the reality of the present. The cinematic effects of All the Pretty Horses confront the reader with the themes of the book in a way that seems visceral due to its juxtaposition to the previous structure, yet simultaneously inevitable because of its nature as a reflection on the past.
Examining All the Pretty Horses through Deleuze’s ideas of the movement- and time-image reveals how literature can operate under principles of the cinematic form and, in doing so, the cinematic elements work in tandem with McCarthy to augment the text’s themes of the unrelenting passage of time. His iconically stylized prose lends itself to cinematic elements throughout All the Pretty Horses; most memorably, his exaggerated sentence length and precisely abstract depictions of the world. McCarthy’s vague-specifics utilize literature’s inherently imaginative nature to establish objects that are grounded in their environs while still being imbued with conceptual meaning, resulting in the imaginary, yet real, object. Through his use of polysyndeton, McCarthy’s imaginary objects obtain relations and the ability to depict cinematic time. All the Pretty Horses exists between times: a fearful present escaping an inevitable future into an impossible past. John Grady’s repeated flight mirrors the structure of a typical movement-image film: a perception into a reaction. John Grady’s reaction happens to be a dream of escaping into the past. John Grady’s movement-image becomes a relentless futility as he comes time and time again to the reality that one cannot escape into a past—much less into a myth. From there, All the Pretty Horses greets John Grady and the reader with the time-image: an inescapable contemplation. With nothing left to run from or lose, John Grady must reflect on the myth of the cowboy—a reality that he can never have, one that could have never been. Thus, he rides off still, if not from anything, then from himself. All the Pretty Horses’ cinema is then the transformation of reflex into inescapable reflection. The text’s ending is cinematic, not because a novel is a film, but because a cinematic effect is not exclusive to cinema: reflection and imagination are as key to cinema as they are to any other art, including the novel. Thus the cowboy can always exist, if not on a silver screen, then on the words of a page—so long as the reader can imagine a sunset.
Works Cited
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. Zone Books, 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, The Athlone Press, 1986.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, the University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Marrati, Paola. Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008.
McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. Vintage Books, 1992.
Murray, Joddy. Kinematic Rhetoric: Non-Discursive, Time-Affect Images in Motion. Anthem Press, 2020, pp. 41-77.
Schonig, Jordan. “Gilles Deleuze’s Movement-Image and Time-Image, Explained.” YouTube, uploaded by Film & Media Studies, 18 July 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbYYrRDKm5I
Schonig, Jordan. “Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema Books Part 2: The Movement-Image Ch. 1.” YouTube, uploaded by Film & Media Studies, 1 August 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rf2H-IykDk
Sheppard, Anne. “The Role of Imagination in Aesthetic Experience.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 25, no. 4, 25th Anniversary Issue, 1991, pp. 35-42.
Thompson, Lucas. “Reverse Engineering Cormac McCarthy’s Sentences.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, vol. 15, no. 1, 2017, pp. 88-95.