European journal of American studies  11-2 | 2016 Summer 2016 Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses Michael Wainwright Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11630 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.11630 ISSN: 1991-9336 Publisher European Association for American Studies Electronic reference Michael Wainwright, “Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses”, European journal of American studies [Online], 11-2 | 2016, document 13, Online since 11 August 2016, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11630 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.11630 This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021. Creative Commons License Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses 1 Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses Michael Wainwright A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (152) “If I dont go will you go anyways?” Lacey Rawlins asks his friend John Grady Cole, the protagonist in the first part of Cormac McCarthy’s (1933– ) Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses (1992), concerning their proposed relocation to Mexico. “I’m already gone” (27), replies Cole, unconsciously but succinctly testifying to his own mental state. The sixteen-year-old Cole, in response to the necessities occasioned by his maternal grandfather’s death—an event that will leave him homeless after the sale of the deceased man’s ranch—is projecting part of himself, deracinating a certain element of desire, and transforming the psychological thread attached to that element into a guiding clew. This anticipated escape from the broken nuclear family of Cole’s upbringing reiterates at a later stage of psychological maturation and in another guise an unresolved tension of his psychical infancy. Cole’s projected departure from home hereby appeals to a psychoanalytical interpretation, and this critical approach helps to establish and elucidate the psychological depths of McCarthy’s novel. Specifically, the formative “fort-da” (“gone-there”) game, which Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) defines in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and which Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) emends in reconsidering the psychoanalytical subject (or $), slowly emerges as a revelatory means for analyzing John Grady Cole both as a victim of maternal absence and as a representative of a passing cultural phenomenon, the American cowboy. Numerous critics of McCarthy’s oeuvre, including Edwin T. Arnold and Jay Ellis, have read his works from a Freudian perspective, yet few have analyzed a single work from the more hazardous but proportionally more rewarding vantage point of Lacanian European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses 2 psychoanalysis.1 Nell Sullivan’s prolegomenon on the paradoxical pleasure of jouissance is the most notable exception to this reluctance, but while thepsychoanalytical insights Lacan gleaned from his dialogue with Freud’s conceptualizations require a painstaking appraisal, the restricted space afforded Sullivan by A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy (1995) denies her adequate analytical license.2 In contrast, the following article answers the Lacanian demand for hermeneutical care, not so much psychoanalyzing All the Pretty Horses, as revealing the psychoanalytical prescience of McCarthy’s text. It is perhaps appropriate, therefore, that this critical furtherance, which contributes specifically to McCarthy studies and generally to the application of Lacanian theories to literary studies, concerns at once a form of absence and the insatiate need to fill that void. The nascent individual gradually answering his subjective absence in the fort-da thesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud’s eighteen-month-old grandson. This “good boy,” who neither disturbed his parents at night nor misbehaved in general, was especially attached to his mother, “who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help” (8). Only the child’s habit of picking up small objects and casting them away, an exercise he accompanied with the word fort (or gone), perturbed his mother. Indeed, the infant’s enthusiasm for this activity developed to the point where retrieving the jettisoned items became somewhat onerous. Having repeatedly witnessed the boy’s behavior, Freud concluded, “it was a game”: the sole use the infant made of these items “was to play ‘gone’ with them.” A particular observation supported this hypothesis. “The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it,” recounts Freud. “It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did,” as Freud recalls, “was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive fort. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful da [‘there’]. This, then,” states Freud, “was the complete game—disappearance and return” (9). Freud’s initial interpretation of this ludic function relates to his grandson’s achievement in social terms: the child repudiated the instinctual satisfaction gained from not protesting his mother’s absence; this self-discipline exemplified a libidinal renunciation for which the fort-da exercise provided recompense. On reflection, however, this explanation dissatisfies Freud. “The child cannot possibly have felt his mother’s departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then,” asks Freud, “does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle?” (9). The answer to this question lies in the boy’s passive situation when his mother absented herself. At first, his nascent awareness of her departure overpowered him, reasons Freud, but by simulating the act of maternal departure in the form of a game, the child became an active participant in his own dilemma. “These efforts,” thinks Freud, “might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not.” Notwithstanding the logic of this deduction, Freud rejects this thesis too, submitting two alternative explanations in which the second subordinates the first: the child mastered an unpleasant situation with his fort-da game and the amusement afforded by this exercise expressed his revenge. “Throwing away the object so that it was ‘gone,’” posits Freud, “might satisfy an impulse of the child’s, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him” (10). Thus, European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses 3 the fort-da game has “a defiant meaning: ‘All right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself’” (10); the ludic function actualizes a step on the psychological road to personal identity and independence. The parallel I am drawing between Freud’s eighteen-month-old grandson, as a housebound infant, and McCarthy’s John Grady Cole, as a prospective emigrant from his motherland, implies that the teenage Cole is expostulating, “All right, America, don’t mother me (you no longer embody my beliefs, ideals, and practices). I don’t need you. I am leaving you for a surrogate mother, one who meets my needs and expectations: Mexico.” The age difference between the two subjects may seem to argue against my analogy, but disruption of an infantile phase of psychological maturation leaves a legacy that remains active into adult life. Moreover, sociohistorical factors pertain to the unconscious in significant ways, and Freud’s explanation of the fort-da game, which overly relies on the paradigm of the nuclear family, actually works in favor of this interpretational analogy. A nascent subject within Freud’s favored social structure faces two opposed but interlinked demands: he must not only find satisfaction in a single parent, his mother, but also gain that fulfillment despite the repression demanded by orthodox family relations. Although John Grady Cole was born in 1933, when the nuclear family was the standard American kindred structure, McCarthy offers a different scenario in All the Pretty Horses, a scenario that anticipates postwar alterations to the environment formative of attachment behavior. Hence, in terms of a literary hermeneutic, the dissolution of the nuclear family severely complicates the equivalence between the Freudian infant and the infant Cole; instead of Cole’s behavior taxing maternal devotion, his mother’s actions sow the troubled seeds of her son’s psychological maturation. “We were married ten years before the war come along,” Cole’s father latterly tells his son. “She was gone from the time you were six months old till you were about three. I know you know somethin about that and it was a mistake not to of told you. We separated. She was in California” (25). That neither Cole nor his father ever uses the Christian name of Cole’s mother implies the psychological blanking that accompanies the compromised development of the boy’s subjectivity. Ordinarily, cowboy culture operates according to a sexual division oflabor, which expects women to superintend the space of domesticity, providing the physical and emotional background that not only supports men’s economic labors outside the home, but also supplies and nurtures the laborers (both male and female) of the future. For the nascent subject, these social relations foreground the maternal while obscuring the paternal presence, a gendered asymmetry that the father’s demands on the mother slowly begin to rebalance. Cole’s mother, however, upsets these standard structures. A double loss informs the nascent subject and this twofold absence necessitates a psychological treatment of McCarthy’s protagonist in All the Pretty Horses. The novel cannot but follow the lead of John Grady Cole’s unconscious. For, unlike the Freudian case, the departure from Texas of Cole’s mother signals not minutes, nor hours, but years of maternal absence. She does not nurture her son and disregards the expectations of maternal responsibility; in consequence, two female house servants, Luisa and her mother Abuela, must tend John Grady. “Luisa looked after you,” confirms Cole’s father. “Her and Abuela” (25). In Freud’s nuclear family, the mother tends her child “without any outside help” (8), but the infant Cole relies on two surrogates. “Una abuela” translates from Spanish into English as “a grandmother,” making Abuela’s Luisa, in effect, “a mother.” These familiar names for blood relations European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses 4 belie the fact that the two women’s attendance on the infant Cole, which cannot help but present a shifting female image, is unfamiliar in kindred terms. The cues of kin- related recognition, which Cole’s father provides on the paternal side, remain barely exercised in their maternal register. In short, his mother’s fleeting presence followed by her long-term absence traumatizes Cole’s developing psyche. That he will forever withhold his mother’s Christian name, as a conditional secret respected by his father, expresses through silence his devastating attachment to her absence. Lacan’s emendation of Freudian fort-da theory, which reemphasizes the basic paradigm, but without recourse to Freud’s methodological sleights of hand, helps to interrogate McCarthy’s skill in delineating this form of psychological disturbance. The first of Freud’s prestidigitations involves his data collection. Freud gathered much of his fort-da evidence “not from the episode itself,” chronicles John Brenkman, “but from the boy’s behavior a year later” (148). The second sleight of hand, as Brenkman observes, concerns Freud’s interpretation of the libidinal content of the fort- da exercise, which “clearly derives from the observations made between the time the child was three-and-a-half and nearly six” (149). Adducing his overall analysis axiomatically from a later stage of psychical development is Freud’s third prestidigitation. Thus, the Oedipus complex, weighing in favor of the maturing boy’s desire for revenge, erroneously influences Freud’s interpretation of an earlier stage of psychical development. In contrast, Lacan does notdeny the incidence and importance of fort-da behavior as a normal part of psychological maturation, but reinterprets this game in interrelational terms: the nascent subject traverses two successive domains, the “real” and the “imaginary,” before the ludic function draws him into the “symbolic” realm of language. In the neonatal state of the real, maintainsLacan, the infant is a non-subject unable to distinguish between himself and the “Other” that satisfies his requirements. His “first status as an infant,”Éric Laurent explains, “is to be a lost part of that Other” (“Alienation and Separation [II]” 30). The real is the easiest stage of psychical development to define but the most difficult to describe. In a sense, one cannot talk about the real; any such discussion is impossible. The moment the real becomes an object of discourse, its description by symbolic components (individuals and language) negate its existence. One can only study the real in its effects on the imaginary, which is the prelinguistic phase of subjective coalescence, and on the symbolic, which grounds the subject in society. Nonetheless, “as Lacan argues in many different contexts,” and as Brenkman emphasizes, “a child’s dependence on its mother is a dependence on her love” (146). She is the nascent subject’s all-powerful Other. That the psychological limbo of prenatal existence lasts for approximately six months, and that his mother deserts Cole when he is “six months old” (25), are therefore significant details in All the Pretty Horses. Her abandonment of Cole, when she simply “left out of here” (25), imposes on her child a psychical separation from the maternal Other, not as a gradual ontogenetic process, but as a sharp transition dictated from beyond rather than from within the prospective subject. Cole’s delightful freedom of non-presence in the presence of his mother is dramatically curtailed and only the attenuated succor of Luisa and Abuela as substitute mothers accompanies his separation from the maternal Other. This unsatisfactory state of affairs is the “tuché,” or Lacanian trauma, which accompanies Cole’s transition into the imaginary. European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses 5 The self-awareness that arises in the imaginary, an ability that Lacan designates as “mirror imaging,” emanates from an evolutionarily fostered fascination with aesthetic form. This developmental phase, in which the infant becomes aware of himself as a fractured collection of parts that are distinct from their surroundings and thereafter slowly learns to appreciate his body as a single unit of interconnected parts, lasts for approximately twelve months. Confronted by his mirror image not only in the specular glass, but also in the movements of other people, and especially in his mother’s actions, the baby eventually recognizes the self-enclosed nature of human physiology. For Cole, the nascent self-awareness suggested by his appearance at the opening of the novel is at once restricted and distorted. The image Cole first presents to the reader, which occurs as he enters his grandfather’s homestead to pay his respects over the dead man’s body, is a form of projection. Whereas “the candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered,” the “black suit[ed]” Cole “stood in the dark glass,” as if trapped within the reflective process of mourning as unfulfilled self-enlightenment. Moreover, the rigor mortis both of his grandfather’s dead body and in “the portraits of forebears only dimly known to him all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscoting” of the hallway repay the young Cole’s obsequies (3; emphasis added). Cole is “initially framed by reflecting glass” (36), as Stephen Tatum notes, but this Lacanian mirroring within a frame amounts to more than Tatum’s motif of “reflections” that “cast shadows” (35). To varying extents, every mature subject’s relation to society is analogous to that nascent subject’s interaction with his mirror image, because the emerging subject’s situation relates to an unattainable ideal. The pall of shadowing in this scene, therefore, connotes two images of perfection beyond Cole’s reach: his mother and his cowboy heritage. Notwithstanding the identification of mirror imaging, the emerging subject does not realize his capacity for independent action at this time—the self-sufficiency of reflected forms goes unnoticed. “Self-identity is thereby caught in the conflict between the experience of an uncoordinated body invested with needs, affects, and unmastered movements,” as Brenkman explains, “and an imaginary body that forms the core of the subject’s ego. At the same time, this experience marks the original split in the subject’s relation to the body; the erotogenic body is divided from the body image” (156). Reflected in his grandfather’s corpse, as in a mirror darkly, is the imaginary body of the black-suited Cole. Enlightenment dawns on Cole, but this is the dark, negative, or absent knowledge that death “was not sleeping. That was not sleeping” (4). Significantly, as one can surmise from Cole’s tendency to avoid his specular image, the curtailment of delightful freedom in his mother’s presence—the suddenness and completeness of which the shifting attendance of his Mexican surrogates only accentuated—dominated his transition through the imaginary. His mother’s withdrawal from the home was formative of Cole’s fractured self-awareness. His Mexican lover, Alejandra Rocha, will briefly inspire Cole with the hope of resetting these psychological shards. “Such harborage,” as Terrell L. Tebbetts points out, “would make him no longer a wanderer over the surface of the earth but a man rooted in it” (51). Hence, on the one occasion when the teenage Cole does contemplate himself in a mirror, which occurs after a drunken fight in response to his permanent split from Alejandra, a self-apprehending gaze confirms Cole’s personal sense of shattered subjectivity. Inaugurated over fifteen years earlier, as the hazy condition of the glass adumbrates, the unmistakable signs emanating from his mother’s initial absence European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses 6 persist. Maternal absence, implies All the Pretty Horses, both impels Cole’s self-scrutiny and confirms his self-focused expectations. Cole does not see anything other than his fractured self: “He studied his face in a clouded glass. His jaw was bruised and swollen. If he moved his head in the mirror to a certain place he could restore some symmetry to the two sides of his face and the pain was tolerable if he kept his mouth shut” (255). He can only stand and endure this painful reconfirmation. According to Lacan, self-imagery makes identification and recognition a separate, or distanced, fiction that guides the efforts of the infant toward autonomy. These attempts elicit a specific form of joy, or Lacanian jouissance, when the nascent subject both identifies with his reflected image and recognizes his control over that image. Even so, insists Lacan, the maternal Other is the locus in which subjective characteristics become present, with the mother the ultimate selector and articulator of her child’s jouissance. Paradoxically, while a feeling of articulated control replaces the infant subject’s sense of fractured self, any attendant feelings of independence are an illusion because the infant remains wholly dependent on his mother. Conversely, as “the real substance at stake for jouissance” (Laurent, “Alienation and Separation [II]” 31), the child is constitutive of the maternal Other’s desire. The infant Cole, as a part of his mother’s jouissance, was an obstruction to her own desire. This obstacle presented the threat of aphanisis, which Ernest Jones (writing in Freud’s shadow and prefiguring Lacan) defines in the “Early Development of Female Sexuality” (1927) as “the total, and of course permanent, extinction of the capacity (including the opportunity) for sexual enjoyment.” Aphanisis, insists Jones, is “the fundamental fear which lies at thebasis of all neuroses” (23). In McCarthy’s novel, Cole’s mother did not want the restrictions of married motherhood, which her own mother’s position in the paternal homestead had prefigured. Instead of the cares and responsibilities that attend the role of the maternal Other, she desires the freedoms of single womanhood. Cole is her only child, and her divorce from his father is final before her own father’s death. Subsequently, her stage career, on the one hand, and the men that attend her, on the other hand, signify her release from familial and social expectations. That she is an actress, someone who defers to a playwright’s artistic practice, is rather ironic: her freedom is as illusory, or fictional, as the roles she plays on stage. In effect, her career puts a psychological impediment on display. In Lacanian terms, the human self comes into being through a fundamentally aesthetic type of recognition and, as the separation involved in mirror imaging suggests, complete unity of selfhood is unattainable. The partial coalescence of identity results from the identification of the self with a false image of that self. This imaginary Other prescribes a yearning in adulthood for the omniscience of articulated control so fleetingly experienced during mirror imaging. Put simply, what is commonly called “the self” is not the self at all but an imaginary (or illusory) Other, which Lacan calls the “specular I.” Nevertheless, that mirror imaging replaces the feeling of physical inarticulation with an awareness of physiological self-expression indicates that the maturing infant is receptiveto articulated systems; as a result, semiotic manifestations come within the purlieu of the developing subject. Lacan appropriates Freud’s account of his grandson’s actions with a cotton reel to trace this stage in psychological maturation. The fort-da game, which responds to the lengthening absences of the maternal Other that accompany the child’s development, and which signals the transition from the imaginary to the symbolic, is a phenomenon European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses 7 of both consciousness and linguistics: this behavior does not so much express the subject’s wish for revenge as the desire for situational interactions that will acquaint that subject with the symbolic. “Need matures into Desire via recognition from the Other” (73–74), as Ellie Ragland-Sullivan states, and “Desire,” as James M. Mellard notes, “is imaged by Lacan as the ‘dérive de la jouissance’” (121). Paternal authority now comes into play. The father uses language to call the mother, which takes her away from their child and the tasks of motherhood, and the developing subject begins to notice the recurring nature of these summonses. In All the Pretty Horses, two sources of male symbolic usage—neither of which Cole’s father provides—tempt Cole’s mother away from her son: the words of playwrights—the majority of whom are men—and those of her lovers. In the first case, “looking for some point of connection,” relates Tebbetts, Cole “hitchhikes to San Antonio through a long and bitter winter day to see his mother in her play. He hopes to grasp her world, what it is to her.” Their two domains, however, as Tebbetts implies, are mirror images: “she has seen nothing in the ranch, while he loves it; he sees nothing in the play, while she loves it” (40). To one enamored of the stage, or the theatrics of an indoor space, the geographical expanse of a cowboy ranch remains untenable. To one inculcated by cowboy culture, or man’s ecological environing of outdoor spaces, the strict delimitations imposed by the proscenium arch elicit little interest. Thus, men other than her husband keep Cole’s mother from him, and the absence enforced by these Others significantly exceeds the brief departures normally occasioned by the man who shares a home with his wife and son. In Lacanian terms, the absences caused by the male use of language inscribe a trace of “specific castration” in the psyche of the maturing subject. Repeated occasions of calling the maternal Other away from her charge imply that the mother is “not-all.” She represents a lack related to sexual difference, but this absence is symbolic rather than biological, with the signifier that names this female lack being the Lacanian “phallus.” The phallus is the privileged signifier that dominates the symbolic and determines the meanings of other signifiers. Through the process of language, humans discover and learn to accept the symbolic order by repressing what is unacceptable to orthodox standards. Vestigial desire for the real and the joy associated with imaginary mastery become the unconscious part of the psyche. In this way, an individual becomes a fit member of society—what Lacanian terms the “social I.” For Cole, however, attempts to expand the significance of his fort-da game fall foul of interactions and relationships that confirm the initial trauma inflicted by that exercise: his mother’s two-and-a-half-year maternal absence encapsulates not only his transition into the imaginary, but also his shift into the symbolic. The genesis, dynamics, and relays of the fort-da game instantiate a formative subject’s first interpersonal relationship. Hence, the fort-daexercise at once reveals the prospect of intersubjectivity and introduces the subject to language. “The game,” avers Brenkman, “is an appeal to, an opening onto, a leap toward interactions which the situational context of the child’s experience does not immediately provide”; as with the later Oedipus complex,the fort-da exercise isa dialectical rite of passage “between the self-activity of speaking-playing and the institutionally constrained discourses and interactions in the situation itself” (150). Freud, although guilty of methodological sleights of hand, was correct in attributing significance to actions that combine occultation (as in the cotton reel disappearing from his grandson’s sight) with the conjugation of the phonemes fort and da. “No one would dispute that Freud was European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses 8 right,” states Lacan in “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power” (1958), “to translate” his grandson’s behavior “immediately by the Fort! Da! of the German he as an adult spoke.” Even so, maintains Lacan, “phonetic perfection is less important than phonemic distinction” (497). By entering the linguistic system, the subject begins to assimilate a structure of differences, but must do so in medias res. This absorption is necessary for the child’s development into a functioning member of society, and the world of signs, as a domain characterized by long-standing antinomies, awaits that subject with a predetermined position. In the context of the nuclear family, these binary oppositions include father/ mother, husband/wife, male/female, brother/sister, mother/son, father/daughter, mother/ daughter, and father/son. Lacan’s famous S/s (or Signifier/signified) of urinary segregation, which inverts Ferdinand de Saussure’s definition of the sign as Signified/signifier, underscores this point. Signs that differentiate between washrooms according to gender—“Ladies” and “Gentlemen”—need not denote a difference in signifieds, asserts Lacan in “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud” (1957): the water closet for women and men might be separate rooms but can be conceptually identical. In this instance, visual signifiers S and S do not denote 1 2 distinguishable signifieds s and s ; rather, S and S state and confirm orthodox 1 2 1 2 attitudes toward sexual difference. Put succinctly, signifiers tell subjects where to go and into which segregational category they fit, with Lacan’s reversal of Saussurean precedence emphasizing the Lacanian contention that signifiers hold primacy over signifieds. The maternal Other relays not only the first of these signifiers—initially she is the child’s exclusive language provider—but also a wider sense of otherness to the maturing subject—language is a form of communal expression. The mother dominates her infant’s imaginary domain and oversees (or referees) her child’s fort-da game; as Brenkman points out, “her exclusive discourse defines her ‘omnipotence’” (146). In Cole’s case, the non-presence of the maternal Other during mirror imaging anticipates the master signifier of maternal absence during his fort-da exercise, and his mother’s return to the family approximately eighteen months into the third and final Lacanian phase of her son’s psychological maturation corroborates his primary acknowledgment of his mother’s nonpresence. She is too late to heal Cole’s tuché and her reappearance merely exacerbates his unresolved fort-da tension. “Even when they are together,” Tebbetts observes, “they are apart” (40). Unsurprisingly, a lack of maternal bonding during childhood has instilled in Cole both a precocious awareness of the illusory dimension of human autonomy and a pronounced lack of linguistic articulation. “You dont talk much,” observes a truck driver who picks up the hitchhiking teenager. “Not a whole lot” (19), replies the mutedly grateful hiker, before relapsing into silence. Cole’s bilingualism testifies to the presence during his infancy of an American father and Mexican surrogate mothers, while his reticence bears witness to his formative tuché. The need to heal this scar—a pressure that overemphasizes the “not-all” of womanhood—becomes the unconscious impetus behind Cole’s desire for jouissance. Cole’s father unconsciously helps to transcribe his son’s anxiety onto a related plane by teaching him chess. This ludic translation serves Cole’s unappeased appetite for deracinating a certain element of desire, with chess supplying a repetitive substitute for formative fort-da situations. “Whatever in repetition is varied,” asserts Lacan in The Four Fundamentals of Psycho-Analysis (1977), “is merely alienation of its European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016 Too Far Gone: The Psychological Games of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses 9 meaning. The adult, and even the more advanced child, demands something new in his activities, in his games. But this ‘sliding-away’ (glissement) conceals what is the true secret of the ludic, namely, the most radical diversity constituted by repetition in itself” (61). The fort-da game exhibits this glissement. The formative subject manifests itself, argues Lacan, as an insistence that the story should always be the same, that its recounted realization should be ritualized, that is to say, textually the same. This requirement of a distinct consistency in the details ofits telling signifies that the realization of the signifier will never be able to be careful enough in its memorization to succeed in designating the primacy of the significance as such. To develop it by varying the significations is, therefore, it would seem, to elude it. This variation makes one forget the aim of the significance by transforming its act into a game, and giving it certain outlets that go some way to satisfying the pleasure principle. (61–62). The fort-da exercise repeatsthe tuché of the mother’s departure, but is not identical with that trauma; rather, this repetition entails something radically different. “The fort-da game, then, opens a field of playing and speaking,” as Brenkman states, “which can develop various permutations and transformations. There is no reason to assume that the game, however much it takes its significance from repetition, does not also contain the possibility of new uses, elaborations, applications” (147). In All the Pretty Horses, the game of chess, as an iterative source of radical difference, becomes one means by which John Grady Cole temporarily satisfies his need for jouissance. Chess exemplifies a markedly different class of pastime from many kinds of recreation because tactical problems of complete information that exclude chance are not games in the usual sense. “Chess is a well-defined form of computation,” as John von Neumann—the father of game theory—once explained to Jacob Bronowski. “You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution; a right procedure in any position” (324). Every contingency in chess is open to tabulation. The permutations of the game, which rely on projecting various pieces into the territory shared by one’s opponent, as if jettisoning objects to elicit responses from a particular Other, provide an elaborate set of fort-da variations. Cole plays chess against his father until the age of eight. Then, in a parallel to his mother’s absence, Cole’s father leaves home. He must serve overseas in WWII and his son’s major ludic outlet is frustrated. The translation of chess from a fort-da to an Oedipal situation, which would see Cole gain enough experience to beat his father over the chessboard, is indefinitely deferred because Cole Senior’s ordeals as a prisoner of war deplete his mental reserves and, on his return from the East, he has only “the patience to play poker” (11). This recreation soon turns into a kind of a vocation. The remains of his acumen enable Cole Senior to lose himself in the adrenalin surge of semiprofessional gambling rather than the shattered memories of war. On one occasion, John Grady offers to “bring the chessboard” (11) to his father’s hotel room, but Cole Senior is not interested. This denial breaks a gaming provenance handed down from father to son and represents a newly severed family tie. As a result, John Grady opens his ludic faculty to another form of play, with life on his maternal grandfather’s ranch offering him a role, or Lacanian “fantasy,” which not only feeds his lack of jouissance, but also satisfies his desire for independence. This formative vocation also proffers Cole an unconventional mirror. “The souls of horses,” as the old “mozo” (110) Luis will later tell him, “mirror the souls of men” (111), and Cole learns to appreciate equine companionship. Horses become a matter of both European journal of American studies, 11-2 | 2016