The Border Paradigm in Cormac Mccarthy's The
THE BORDER PARADIGM IN CORMAC MCCARTHY’S THE CROSSING ISABEL SOTO In this essay I explore various concepts in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing: the border, space and geography. I argue firstly that the border or frontier is the organizing principle, generating most, if not all, the tex- tual strategies at the levels of discourse, theme and plot. These strategies frequently involve structures of doubleness mediated literally or figura- tively by the border paradigm. Obvious examples can be located in such archetypal binaries as male-female, life-death, past-present. Most nota- bly, perhaps, large portions of McCarthy’s text alternate English and a form of Spanish defined by, or constitutive of, the United States-Mexican border. I argue secondly, therefore, that the border is closely bound to the concept of space. McCarthy’s characters will have to negotiate various sites or spaces: human, natural and otherworldly. Thirdly, I argue that the constructs of the border and space articulate a variation, or perhaps unre- solved, version of Heraclitus’ notion of geography as fate. Thus, in the mythical contours of the journeys McCarthy’s characters undertake, ge- ography does not so much constitute fate as propose experience: always unfinished, always in the making. Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy (1992-1998) 1 could be described argua- bly as a cycle of coming-of-age novels, characterized by such requisite initiation procedures as leaving home, becoming orphaned, confronting death, acquiring sexual knowledge, and so on. Perhaps a more interesting, and productive, focus might be on how those rites of passage are articulated or, indeed, whether they are fully realized.
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