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[proximoception]

Cities of the Plain

I drank too much of the strong tea and stayed up all night finishing the book yesterday, because I knew I wasn't sleeping, but was too tired and jittery to make full sense of the Epilogue. I liked some of the book and disliked some. All the Pretty Horses is an excellent and very fun book, The Crossing less good and much less pleasant but greater, great and haunting. This last one I need to think about more.

I wonder most of all what the exploding dog episode meant. Grady being pulled apart by the competing ties of principle/El Paso/America/Cole-ness and fate/Juarez/Mexico/Billitude? Heh, surely something, though presumably not that.

The thing with the Epilogue is I wasn't sure if it was talking about McCarthy's writing the book or Billy's having somehow dreamed Grady. Billy's story is I suppose the more dreamlike--the first two books are versions of one another--but John's is a traditional narrative, a novel, infused with how things ought to be. Realistic but perhaps ultimately unreal, where Crossing is surely meant to be symbolic but of true things.

Anyway, whoever dreamed it, it is the dreamed figure who has the gnosis--a curious one merging total freedom and contingency, as though consciousness were just matter from the inside (?; as I read it)--and is able to accept death and save the girl, who is surely named Mexico whatever her limits turn out to be. The real one can't do it, and apparently needs women to save him.

Freaked out by this coincidental IM exchange simultaneous with my writing the above:

D: i keep having really long action-movie dreams
D: last night was set in some jungle swamp, like vietnam or Southern Comfort
S: Actual nightmares?
D: there were lots of bugs.
D: they cant be nightmares cause i'm not really in it. there's a main character who i occassionally inhabit.

Like what the authorial Mexican spoke of. Like Billy I don't think I ever did this. Going to have to reread the whole Epilogue clearly.

Comments

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Reminded me a bit of Stevens' WW2 stuff too, and especially Eliade--and Jesus and Hamlet, as it was clearly meant to. I liked it better than almost everything else in the book, except a couple of the old Mr. Johnson scenes and yeah that fight--despite its flirting with unbearability. It just sends me back to the drawing board re. McCarthy.