"The immappable world of our journey": The Re-emergent Dream Forms in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy

Abstract

Conventional analysis of dream devices in postmodern literature does not often take into account medieval dream-visions as a potential point of origin. Looking more closely at the highly specialized spatial constructions and social functions of this earlier genre can provide new insight into why authors like Cormac McCarthy offer less readily interpretable versions of the dream-visions in later works of fiction. While these early dream forms appeared as formalized narratives that attempted to map a spiritual landscape, McCarthy's dream-visions function to map the landscape of memory, a landscape unique to each individual. The surreal landscape that Billy Parham wanders in the second and last novels of the trilogy provides a means of linking the dream-visions, as the term can imply both the cultural context in which dream-visions are formed as well as the concrete, visual backdrop for these visions. Both abstract and concrete, landscape can be as formless as the unseen religious conventions that shape the medieval dreamers' visions or as distinctive as the eerie Mexican wilderness that McCarthy's protagonists travel through.

While the medieval dreamers try to understand an immaterial, spiritual world in attempt to make their way to God, McCarthy's postmodern dreamers must find order in the real world, and make their way through that world with a much less clearly defined goal. Billy and John Grady Cole wander in a landscape where what each sees in reality is alien and unfamiliar, while what is familiar—their memories—is not present, appearing only in his mind's eye, that is, in the dream-visions. These realms cannot be reconciled; the resulting contrast makes the postmodern dream-visions less universally interpretable and increases the significance of the individual dreamer in relation to his or her own dream. By preserving the dream-vision as a potential channel for illumination and a space outside the constructs of reality, McCarthy offers a translation of conventional medieval dream-vision form into the terms of an existential, highly fragmented postmodern world.