A note on horses in All the Pretty Horses.

Zheng, Jianqing

One striking characteristic of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses is the philosophical descriptions of horses that relate the protagonist John Grady Cole's mind and love, as in this passage:

 What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood
 and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all
 his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the
 ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be
 otherwise (NY: Vintage, 199, p. 36).

To John Grady, the wild horses symbolize the unfallen spirit in nature that he desires. Although his love of horses means his love of humans, it does not mean that he is satisfied with his human life. As a result, his dissatisfaction results in his excursion to Mexico where he follows his desire to work with the wild horses and search for his real being in the world.

John Grady's search also reflects a contrast between the unfallen and spiritual and the fallen and mundane. Since the horses represent unfallen nature, he tells them his experiences in the mundane world. For instance, on his way to see Alejandra, he says to his horse "things he thought could be true to see how they would sound if they were said. He told the horse why he liked it and why he'd chosen it to be his horse and he said that he would allow no harm to come to it" (242). This illustrates his relationship with the horses as well as his loneliness in the human world. His determination to "allow no harm to come" to the horses expresses not only his love of horses but also his aim to maintain an unfallen spirit through his union with nature.

In fact, the horses, like a spiritual bridge between John Grady and nature, have become part of his life and blood:

 They did not smell like horses. They smelled like what they were,
 wild animals. He held the horse's face against his chest and he
 could feel along his inner thighs the blood pumping through the
 arteries ... (103)

The description of John Grady's close relationship with the horses reveals his affinity with nature and the philosophical notion of an essential unity of human beings with the universe that connects the external world and internal emotion. To John Grady, nature is the spiritual embodiment of his internal feelings.

In The Literary Mind Carves Dragons, Liu Xie, an ancient Chinese critic (ca. 465-522), remarks that "when feelings are stirred, language gives them an outer shape; and when the inherent principle emerges, pattern is clear. By following a course from what is hidden, we reach something manifest. What appears on the outside corresponds to what lies within" (Owen, Stephen, ed. An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 [NY: Norton, 1996]: 349). In All the Pretty Horses, the horses, as part of John Grady's life and blood, always stir his feelings. His desire to see his real being through his love deeply rooted in the wild horses allows him to see the horses even in his dream, an outside correspondence to what lies within him:

 In his sleep he could hear the horses stepping among the rocks
 and he could hear them drink from the shallow pools in the dark
 where the rocks lay smooth and rectilinear as the stones of
 ancient ruins and the water from their muzzles dripped and
 rang like water dripping in a well and in his sleep he dreamt of
 horses and the horses in his dream moved gravely among the
 tilted stones like horses come upon an antique site where some
 ordering of the world had failed and if anything had been
 written on the stones the weathers had taken it away again and
 the horses were wary and moved with great circumspection
 carrying in their blood as they did the recollection of this and
 other places where horses once had been and would be again.
 Finally what he saw in his dream was that the order in the
 horse's heart was more durable for it was written in a place
 where no rain could erase it. (280)

The last sentence of the above may raise a question about whether the order of the human world is as durable as that of nature. Since the horses symbolize the unfallen spirit in nature and John Grady's love of horses means his love of human beings, one can reckon that human beings are a durable part of nature, too. The wild horses are pretty, and so is the human world. One can find such evidences at the end of the novel through the positive responses John Grady receives from the judge and the reverend Blevins.

Jianqing Zheng, Mississippi Valley State University