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. McCarthy’ s mid-trilogy novel The Crossing (1994) is constructed around just such a series of ritualistic maneuvers, each of which acquiesces in the novel’s central paradigm. In this essay I propose that the border cannot be disengaged from the concept of territorial space or geography: characters enter alternating or conflicting geographical sites, or acknowledge human spaces alongside those that are

1 All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998). 52 Isabel Soto not of this world. The novel opens by foregrounding border and geography.

When they came south out of Grant County Boyd was not much more than a baby and the newly formed county they’d named Hidalgo was itself little older than the child [...] The new country was rich and wild. You could ride clear to Mexico and not strike a crossfence [...] (3)

The border is thus established as the dominant paradigm on the novel’s first page. My overall thesis is that it generates most if not all of the text’s strategies at the level of discourse, theme and plot. Thus, to the extent that they articulate the border paradigm, discourse, theme, and plot are central to my discussion. We will see that not the least interesting aspect of the border paradigm is that it encloses the possibility both of observance and transgres- sion; one can cross it or not. Expressed another way, it denotes a site of difference between two spaces and, simultaneously, the site, or point, at which one space may be accessed from the other. 2 Hence I will explore the border in The Crossing both as a static construct or site of demarcation, and also in its dynamic variant, as a threshold providing access to two spaces, figurative or real, adjacent to it. Further, if we take the border as the organiz- ing principle in The Crossing , we discover that the text frequently yields representations of doubleness, or equivalences, or variants. Always our implied mediating structure is the border or threshold. I consider below these representations of doubleness, whether as figures of difference or figures of equivalence or duplication. The unfailingly paradoxical nature of the thresh- old or border is reinforced by these patterns and structures of doubleness, the effect of which is to stress similitude or magnify difference: in similitude the border holds fast; in difference it is crossed or transcended. I will end my discussion by considering McCarthy’ s contrapuntal— double—use of Spanish and English and their mutual inflection, in which respect another, perhaps obvious, point needs to be made: the geographical context of the Border Trilogy is what facilitates the use of Spanish in the first place, and the alternation, even symbiosis, between English and Spanish in the second. The narratives do not unfold in Australia or Sweden. To this extent, then, geography generates experience and the discourse through which that experience is mediated. Indeed we find geography and discourse eliding in the service of experience. To repeat the above quotation from the opening of The Crossing , “When they came south out of Grant County Boyd

2 I am indebted here to Manuel Aguirre and Esteban Pujals from the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid. Our many discussions of the limen or threshold have directly contributed to my formulation of the border paradigm and to many of the ideas in this essay.