The Crossing 

Cormac McCarthy

When I have written about literature on this blog I have, up until what I wrote about Gatsby, given a clear outline of plot and wrapped my blog post up with a comment or opinion about the book I reviewed. I have done this in order to keep it simple: tell what happens--i.e. the plot--and then describe the plot's implementation. I try to explain, in other words, the aesthetic choices the writer employs in telling his story.

With the novel Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje, the stories encapsulated between the pages of the book are multiple and far reaching and because the foregrounded plot relates to the narrator, I derive meaning from the way the story is told. The telling relates to how stories are told and to the inner workings of human consciousness as much as it is about childhood abandonment, the system of education in England, London  as it existed at the time of World War II, etc. 

It is true, too, to an extent, with The Great Gatsby, that consciousness belies reality. Here the plot line seeps out over the course of the novel and includes a backstory imbued by the narrator's subjective feelings for his subject as well as his commentary on class and ethics. 

Unfortunately, at times I feel we live in a world of philistines, people who delight in placing political and or sociological concerns before aesthetics when analyzing text. People who read for utility rather than pleasure. So it is with some trepidation that I announce to no one in particular (I figure that anyone who reads my blog will find something in it they need) that I plan to write a bit about Cormac McCarthy, a White man with many ex-wives. 

One basic goal of literature is to do with language that which has not been done before. McCarthy's style markings litter his oeuvre: he uses no quotation marks to delineate character speech; his texts are filled with characters who speak Spanish; and his prose, generally, mimics the language of the Old Testament, or, at the very least, William Faulkner or Herman Melville's Moby Dick.  

This last is important because McCarthy writes books of young men on quests. His Border Trilogy, of which The Crossing is book two, relates two coming-of-age stories set just before and right after the Second World War on the borderland between Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. In All the Pretty Horses, a sixteen year old sets off on horseback with his best buddy to explore Northern Mexico and to try to work there as a ranch hand after his mother, who has long separated from his War traumatized father, sells the family ranch.

In The Crossing a teenage boy in New Mexico living near the Arizona and Mexico border is tasked with capturing a wolf that has been killing his family's cattle. Instead of euthanizing the pregnant she wolf, after catching her, he puts her on a leash and decides to ride his horse into the mountains of Mexico where he will set her free, returning her to her rightful place in the world.

Things don't go as planned because there is no plan. The adventure with the wolf is followed by a return home, where the boy, Billy, discovers all of his family save his younger brother have been killed, a return to Mexico with his brother, Boyd, in search of the family's horses, a separation there from his brother, another return to New Mexico, and then a final journey to Mexico and back, this time to find and return with his brother.

Billy Parham's quest is divided into three. In the first part he aims to put the world back as it ought to be, or as it was once: before the Spanish and Anglo ranchers fenced off land and began raising domesticated stock. Of course he soon discovers the futility in this venture, but as life so often does, his first decision leads him to his second quest and the attempted recovery of his patrimony, in the form of his father's two stolen horses.

Finally, he returns to Mexico, one last time, to retrieve his brother, who he has been separated from and who, it turns out, has become a legend of the Revolution, a person songs are written about for bravery in battle. His brother has been made a relic, romanticized as a symbol of a mythic time and place where good defeats evil and so by the end of the book we realize that on Billy's quest, unique and complete, he discovers that all that he thought true about the world, all that he held sacred and all he believed, has both led him to this point, his fate, and left him to deal with it alone. 

He wanders the desert of New Mexico, homeless, adrift, without family, looking for work, and in the last pages of the book witnesses, first hand, the detonation of the first test of the atomic bomb at Alamogordo. It is an apocalyptic ending to a unique novel oozing at the edges with dark matter. 

The genius of Cormac McCarthy relates to the fact that he imbues his fiction, from top to bottom, with historic fact and he employs this fact to undermine ideology from left to right. In The Crossing, when Billy and his brother Boyd go looking for their stolen horses, they discover them on a massive ranch owned by an American media magnet. McCarthy models this ranch on Babicora Ranch, owned by William Randolph Hearst, scion of the Hearst family, which existed in the north of the state of Chihuahua until 1953. It was 117 miles long and consisted of more than one million acres. In '53 the Mexican Government seized the land, subdivided it into thousands of parcels, and redistributed it to peasantry. (Phoebe Hearst, wife to George and mother of William Randolph Hearst, purchased the land that became the ranch in 1900 for $100,000).

In 1934, the Mexican government, under Lazaro Cardenas, should have given the Hearst land to the feudal classes. Cardenas did indeed redistribute 45 million acres. He dismantled the hacienda system. (10 percent of the lands were American owned.) However, realistically, the Revolution did not meet its aims and the fighting went on. This is where the Parham brothers arrive in the history. Security officers--private militia--on the Barbicora Ranch have the boys’ horses, and they eventually shoot Boyd in a chase after the boys reclaim the horses; these men are part of Hearst’s personal security apparatus, called the guardia blanca, or white guard. Even after the Revolution, this was contested land. (Earl Shorris, historian of Mexico, claims the Revolution never ended.) Cardenas' social reforms were corrupt. 

There is a lot going on here. On one level McCarthy gives his english reading audience a snapshot of an historical moment most don't know anything about. On another he makes comment on social reform, raw power, and idealism. As I mention, the overarching structure of plot exists in three parts; it is a triptych. There is something deeply religious about Billy's journey. We must imagine that Billy grows, that he matures, as the novel progresses. What becomes clear by the end of the text is that he has lost completely the innocence that allowed him to believe he might capture, tame, save and find a place in the world for a wild animal, because that world does not exist. 

There are powerfully dark forces at work in the universe of Cormac McCarthy, the Hearst family a prime example. In The Crossing he writes about the tension inherent between what amounts to culture, society and governance, and the interior world of the initiate's mind. That consciousness, in the shape of Billy Parham, is left battered and bruised, awake and perhaps aware that the story he has lived, in some way, represents our story and our story can only have meaning in the reality of its destination, the path on which we arrive, again and again, at fate.