A Song of Great Order The Real in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing

Abstract

The real is perhaps the most ambiguous term in critical discourse, and has come to represent a host of investigations into the limit of language as an expressive vehicle in the face of an immaculate silence. As presented in McCarthy’s novel, the real in fact works beyond such theological understandings to move through and past Lacanian models and into aesthetic theories of truth and the nature of the artwork. The writings of Alain Badiou allow us to grasp more concretely the deployment of the real in The Crossing, specifically Badiou’s understanding of the dialectic in the manufacture of meaning and the role of the poetic enunciation in relationship to the revelation of truth. A close reading of the key structuring element of The Crossing, the Mexican folksong of the corrido, reveals how an artistic act can create the world in which it is performed, and how the resulting work of art may be the only thing, in the end, that can be called real.

There are few more diaphanous terms in critical theory than “the real.” Theorist Charles Shepherdson goes so far as to suggest that an entire “map of postmodernism” could be drawn out based on the term’s definition and deployment (1). Primarily at stake in discussions of the real is an attempt to think through the linguistic turn made by philosophy in the opening decades of the twentieth century, and determine the actual reach and effect of discursive constructions in relation to a larger and perhaps unspeakable sphere of experience. In short, “the real” has come to represent the limit of language as an expressive vehicle.

Most often the term is presented through the various apparatuses that constitute the evolution of Jacques Lacan’s thought from the 1940s into the late 70s, where he posits “the Real” as both the void outside of discourse as well as the gap within discourse itself.¹ These two Lacanian models are, however, contradictory, forcing readers to either adhere to a specific period of Lacan’s work in order to maintain a consistent view, or to otherwise hold two disparate views of the concept at once. This confusion has resulted in a marked obfuscation in writing about the real, and theorists all too often utilize the term as an indication of a linguistic collapse before an ineffable, if not divine, silence.

In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy provides us with a radically different understanding of both the term of “the real” and the concept it indicates. In a novel that wrestles constantly with the nature of a transcendent deity in relation to the world of man, The Crossing literally employs the real as evidence of the blessings and grace of God.² As the novel’s young protagonist Billy Parham repeatedly questions the existence and motive of a deity who would abide a cruel and senseless world, the character of the blind pensioner uses the real to indicate the presence of something beyond the illusions of man’s existence. For the blind pensioner, man’s imagining of the world is fatally flawed due to its association with language, and everything that man imagines to be true will ultimately “come to naught but dust before him” (The Crossing 293). “[B]ecause what can be touched falls into dust,” the pensioner tells Billy, “there can be no mistaking these things for the real. At best they are only tracings of where the real has been” (294). The pensioner’s recourse to the real here as a functioning term suggests that the inevitable despair that man experiences at the disconnect between his imagination and the world that God has made is not indicative of man’s relationship with that world or that God, but to man’s relationship with an illusion of his own manufacture. God is in possession, finally, of something more “real” than that which man can perceive. But despite the pensioner’s conclusions, The Crossing takes its notion of the real much further than this theological conception, further even than Lacan’s linguistic formulations, ultimately bringing its consideration of the term into the realm of aesthetic theory. Following the implications of the pensioner’s discussion throughout the text of The Crossing, we are able to align the real as presented therein with an understanding of the function of art and its ability to produce meaning and truth. In particular, the treatment of the real in The Crossing suggests a fascinatingly materialist notion of truth in relation to the work of art that hints at what philosopher Alain Badiou has called the “stakes of existence” (Handbook 11).

The foremost philosopher currently working in the lineage of Lacan, Badiou employs a mathematical conception of ontology in order to better grasp the relationship of truth to the regimes of meaning it engenders. Understanding meaning to issue from truth, Badiou’s work aims to concretize and explore an unresolvable tension between the patient production of meaning and the revelation of the truth. Locating the real at the borderlands of meaning, Badiou associates art with a definition of truth that functions outside any previously proscribed meaning. Art, for Badiou, is a manner of thinking that produces truth. The artwork, as a specific and local manifestation of truth, is nothing less than the real itself (Handbook 9). If we can then imagine the work of art to create the manner by which it is understood, we can begin to grasp how the artwork can be positioned in relation to the regime of meaning that the artwork has itself brought about. Badiou writes that the work of art, closed and complete, operates within the “fulfillment of its own limit” (11), a limit that becomes the borders of the world in which it functions. It is my contention that the work of art featured so prominently in The Crossing, the traditional Mexican folk song of the corrido, behaves in just this manner. As Badiou helps to clarify, the delimiting agent of The Crossing is not, in fact, a transcendent God, but is in reality an act of artistic creation, a song that describes the very world it sings into existence.

Much of the scholarship around The Crossing has been too eager to conflate the subtlety of the work with the demonstration of a universal divinity, but to truly grasp the function of the real as presented in The Crossing is to place a welcome check on just such sorts of speculation, for while McCarthy presents a world in which God is never far from the minds or mouths of its characters, the acts or edicts of such an agent are never presented or revealed. In fact, existence such as it is in The Crossing is that which is built and sustained by its myriad characters alone, and while the setting and narrative arc of the novel are unremitting in their stark brutality and nihilism, this novel in particular suggests that there is another response to the indifference of the universe than the rigorous violence displayed by so many of McCarthy’s other protagonists.³

In his essay “McCarthy and the Sacred: A Reading of The Crossing,” Edwin Arnold acknowledges the nihilistic tone of McCarthy’s work previous to The Crossing and suggests that, while the themes of “violence, despair” and the “randomness” of life are detailed “explicitly,” throughout McCarthy’s work, The Crossing illustrates with greater insistence than any of the author’s previous writing the “possibilities of grace, love and charity” (216). If it could be said that these latter elements are indeed present in The Crossing, it must be noted that they are addressed through the labor of the negative. At the opening of the book, the young protagonist Billy Parham leaves his family’s farm in New Mexico to take a captured wolf south, only to later be forced to kill that wolf and return home. Once there, Billy learns of his family’s murder by horse thieves, and he rides back into Mexico with his younger brother Boyd in search of the bandits. In the course of their journeys the boys are separated, and Billy discovers long after the fact that his younger brother has been killed. In the closing chapters of the book, Billy searches for his brother’s grave in an attempt to bring Boyd’s bones back into New Mexico, but Billy is stopped by men who defile his brother’s remains and nearly kill his own horse. At the conclusion of the novel, Billy suffers a breakdown on an empty desert road, looking for something he finds impossible to name.

The unremitting bleakness of the story’s narrative arc is enlivened by the host of strange and colorful characters who provide extensive commentary on the fundamental questions of life brought to the fore by the nature of Billy’s trials. Arnold reads these trials, and the sense of what he calls the “mystical” unity each character attempts to impart to the suffering youth, as McCarthy’s desire that we as readers abandon, along with Billy, illusions of autonomy or independence. The novel instructs us instead to consider our “oneness with the natural, atomic and finally cosmic world” (217). Dianne Luce’s “The Road and the Matrix: The World as Tale in The Crossing” develops the idea of interdependence further to emphasize the image of the “matrix,” so prominent in the novel, as an entity that is understood to bind all beings together in an interlocking unity. Luce touches on the didactic heart of the book in her suggestion that the stories each character relates to Billy function as just such a matrix, binding together as they do the narratives of innumerable lives, including Billy’s own. Participation in just such a matrix—participation in the act of storytelling itself—is the best way in which to “fulfill that aspect of human nature that is in God’s image” (Luce 206). Luce’s insightful and nearly comprehensive reading nevertheless aims, like Arnold’s, to locate and identify a deity toward which to bend its conclusion, suggesting that it is the duty of both Billy and the reader to participate in storytelling in order to best harmonize with God and to, “imitate Him in His weaving of the matrix” (206). Douglas Canfield continues in this vein in “Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy,” where he suggests that The Crossing chiefly confirms what Canfield calls McCarthy’s Christian existentialism, as the novel reveals the absurdity of life while insisting on a greater, and ultimately unknowable, entity (261).

It would be disingenuous to suggest that The Crossing does not deal explicitly with the nature of a Christian God, but this scholarship has been too quick to collapse the text into a flat progression of its protagonist from egotism, through destitution and towards a peace, achieved through the final acceptance of a benevolent deity. Arnold, Luce, and Canfield seem anxious to diffuse the tension of the novel, presenting the work as a testament to the existence of an all-pervasive force that Billy must accept in order to properly participate in his own existence.

Despite the theme of these readings, there is no sign of salvation in The Crossing, even less so that of a savior. The image that closes the book, one of Billy sobbing on an empty road, is less one of uplift than one of crisis, and it is a crisis brought on by a confrontation with what I would suggest is the truth. This is not the truth as it is delivered by a presupposed divinity operating from a position transcendental to the characters of the novel. It is instead a materialist truth, worked through and exposed dialectically throughout the course of the narrative. McCarthy’s use of the real as a delimiting term in relation to the eruption of just such a truth works to check the desire to rush so quickly to ancient models of transcendence. Indeed, the novel may in fact work to build one on its own.

The Song of the Poem

Lacan’s Real can be roughly understood in two distinct forms. In one sense, the Real is traditionally positioned against a “symbolic” or social framework in which the term “Real” designates a realm outside a given set of artificial or socially determined constraints. Such a formulation presents a binary structure of existence, hinging on concepts around the notion of “inside vs. outside.” The Real can be understood here as a base ground or Grund, a “brute reality” inevitably filtered through consciousness (Shepherdson 29).⁴ Such a pre-discursive reality is imagined as more genuine than the one we are fated to perceive. The actual world is always already lost to us through our inevitable misunderstanding. The Real here is an infinitely full register from which humanity has irredeemably fallen.

And yet if the Real is posited as the inaccessible support of a codified space, it becomes vulnerable to a maneuver in which the terms of a binary are understood through their difference. Indeed, Lacan’s presentation of the Real goes through significant revision in his later career, from its initial incarnation as something akin to a Kantian Ding, to an entity best grasped through Lacan’s own formulation of the objet a, which exists not outside of discourse but instead circulates within it as an absence or lack. In Lacan’s later work, the Real becomes not the untranslatable and infinitely full cosmos, but rather the space between such a totalizing concept and the subject who would differentiate itself from it. Here the Real is principally an empty space—a cut—between two elements that are understood through their relation to one another. The Real is an emptiness that allows for the continuance of thought, providing the space necessary for its processes of differentiation. In this sense, the Real becomes less a particular place than a persistent dislocation, an ever-present hole in the given presentation that in turn draws forward the logical processes in their exhaustive advance.

The paradox is that it remains both. The real is one and the same time the location of the absence as well as the absence itself, and in order to speak about the real in the abstract, we are led into excessively fuzzy formulations about “the being” of what “is not,” discussions more commonly associated with “theological disputes” (Shepherdson 27). The source of this confusion lies in the nature of the term itself. The real is the name of a concept that encourages critical thought about the limits of thought. It incites speech about the destruction of language. It is a term for the impossible unification of the opposites.

In this way the real has taken on a quasimystical nature that is ultimately less the result of obfuscatory or sophistic theorists than it is the misidentification of the paradox within the concept. It can now be said to encompass, on one hand, the Kantian ground of the Ding-an-sich that stands beyond codification, as well as the absence of codification—the lack—within thought itself. It is both beyond expression as it all the while takes part in that expression via the signifying term “real.” It is an actual (a real) point, at which logical thought “touches on something outside of itself,” something “simultaneously symbolic and yet also excluded from the system” (Shepherdson 26).

A deadlock in logical thought by design, the real has more recently been handled obliquely by thinkers such as Badiou, who isolate its paradox by working around it, describing more concretely the nature of situations—or worlds—that the real would both sustain and disrupt. Badiou’s landmark work, Being and Event, presents a mathematical understanding of “being” as a series of infinities, meaningless and forever unfolding, a multiplicity ungraspable in any sort of totality. A series of “worlds” wax and wane across this field of being, represented as regimes of meaning and understood as semicoherent, rule-bound situations, anchored by the founding occurrence of an event. Such worlds are sustained by bodies that subject themselves to the responsibility the founding event demands: its “truth.”⁵ Each world itself contains an infinite number of elements, and these elements must be sorted in order to produce a knowledge of the world via its relationship to the truth that defines it. That which has no relation to the founding event of the world therefore has no meaning within it. Disavowing the existence of a singular truth, Badiou insists there are many truths existing simultaneously, each supporting its own regime of meaning. In this way Badiou imagines a series of overlapping worlds, each taking part of the infinite sets of elements.

These worlds, however, are not perpetual. That which was once true cannot hold forever in the face of the infinite cataloguing. The movement from one world to another is accomplished through the saturation of a regime and the eruption of a new truth. Such a truth bores a “hole” in the present world by giving shape to that which is impossible within it, assaulting the set of the world’s knowledge and opening up a space for a new understanding of the infinite elements (Being and Event 525). In this way, the truth leads to the creation of another world entire. Those who subject themselves to the power of the truth are, by dint of its proclamation, able to then recognize and sort the infinite elements in a new way, culling a new finite meaning from the infinities of being. Without such truth to organize the universe, those existing within it vanish as subjects. An existence without fidelity to the truth by which to gauge its meaning is, quite literally, meaningless. The unfortunate souls who have not subjected themselves are thereby reduced to mere bodies, wandering heedless across the field.

As the character of the ex-priest explains early on to Billy, “things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes” (142). Having left his previous life behind, the ex-priest spends his days cowering in an abandoned church “seeking evidence for the hand of God in the world,” a hand that would give meaning to the elements the ex-priest repeatedly encounters: “a doll. A dish. A bone” (142). These are but isolated objects that, without the blessing God would provide, prove empty and absurd. Only the tale, what the ex-priest calls here “the corrido,” has the capability to unite “different worlds,” in the “one world” of its telling (143). The whole world itself, he tells Billy, “is not a thing at all but a tale.” Through the tale, “every least thing” in the world becomes animate. Further, every element must be accounted for, nothing erased or forgotten. Everything is essential, “[b]ecause the seams of the world are hid from us. The joinery.” It is because of the hidden nature of these seams that, for the ex-priest, “we have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives.”

For the ex-priest, it is the corrido that would provide the cohesive force necessary to bring a world into existence in which the doll, dish and bone may then become functioning elements, each with a meaning that contributes to an ultimate purpose. Without his own corrido the ex-priest is therefore lost, doomed to meditate on the nature of God without ever experiencing Him, building a meta-ontology of the tale without submitting himself to the materiality of a living story. This inability to subject himself strips the ex-priest of even a positive appellation. He can only be identified through the negative, through what he was in another world and is no longer. But while the ex-priest supplies us principally with assertions concerning the relationship between story, art, and truth, Badiou allows us to imagine how “different worlds” may be united through the artwork of a tale, allowing us to push deeper into where the ex-priest cannot go: into the “joinery” that would separate the art of the telling from the meaning of the world.

In his essay, “What is a Poem?, Or, Philosophy and Poetry at the Point of the Unnamable,” Badiou writes that humanity is “thinkable” only insofar as it is “sheltered” from the poem (Handbook 16). Poetics must be interrupted in order to think clearly about existence. The reason for this is that poetry overwhelms “discursive thought,” and forbids a working-through of presented concepts (17). Poetry does not “link and deduce” nor “traverse” the elements of being in any sort of “rulebound” procedure. Instead, the poem exists “on the threshold” of the thinkable as a pure “affirmation.” The poem is beyond negation and past debate, delivering itself as a “lawless proposition.”

Lawless in that it is not subject to the dialectic, what Badiou refers to as the “law of being” (Theory of the Subject 3).⁶ For Badiou, the dialectic is the preeminent mechanism of discursive thought in that its operation is one of tireless skepticism, endlessly splitting each presented totality into its constitutive elements. In contrast to an Hegelian dialectic, bound at its outset to both “obtain everything on the basis of a single term” and to find an eventual unification in the Absolute, Badiou’s “materialist” dialectic is bent solely on working through the ramifications of each split term, ignorant of any other responsibility (4). In the midst of this blind process of traversal and identification, the poem is that which persists as an “opening” of thought, insisting on itself throughout the dialectic’s procedure, regardless of proof or support (Handbook 19).⁷

A particular poem, in other words, provides a framework for a future possibility of thought, a “fragmented anticipation of a universe without completion” (Handbook 22). In this way the poem lights up for a brief moment the possibility of what hasn’t yet been completely understood. After the flash of intuition the poem provides, the dialectic is then bound to patiently negotiate that darkness in a dogged and infinite labor, identifying and sorting each element it encounters. This process of identification and definition builds the knowledge of the world, and it is through such labor that a revelation may come to pass. Much more than a mere tool of identification, the dialectic is in fact “centered on the exception that a truth may inflict on what ‘there is’ through an interpolation of what there is not” (Logics of Worlds 6). What the dialectic reveals through its traversal of what “there is,” is that something in the infinite elements “insists in exception” to its operation (6). At the bottom of the dialectic’s process lies a resistance to all concepts, identification, and knowledge. Caught in the dialectical machinery is a statement that does not contain its opposite, an unbreakable exception to what “there is.” This exception, impervious to discursive thought, remains impervious as well to the meaning discursive thought would produce, and the identification of such a statement brings into question the relevance of that meaning. Such a statement exposes, through the statement’s exception to the dialectic’s rule, the rule itself—lighting up, for a brief instant, the possibility of another way.

The dialectic is, then, the ideal tool for working through the thickets of language with language in order to arrive at something resistant to the operation of splitting and categorization. This resistance is a statement that cannot be separated from itself, something “at once immanent,” that is, inherent to the process, “and created,” arising out of the process and dwelling at the limit of expression (Handbook 23). It is in this way that the dialectic can be understood to work through language, “forcing” it to its breaking point and finally bending it into an “other” language altogether, moving the duty of language from description to enunciation (22). It is through the dialectic that the speech of language may be broken into what Badiou calls the “song” of art (22).

Such a song proclaims, through its resistance to the law, another world entire. This new world is attested to by three key features: first, it is “essentially finite,” meaning that it isolates itself against the infinite multiplicity of being that exists outside of thought (Handbook 10); second, it is total and complete to itself, moving “within the fulfillment of its own limit” (11); lastly, it works as an “inquiry into the question of its own finality,” meaning that its operation is to persuade its audience that it speaks to the entirety of existence. This is why each artwork—each song—is complete to itself. Any addition or subtraction to it disrupts its initial claim to totality.

This question of totality is what the song speaks to directly. In the multiplicities of infinity that characterize the endless field of being, the song is, in fact, “the only finite thing that exists” (Handbook 11). While every other linguistic construction can be broken down by the dialectic, the song is complete, its own borders marking the “stakes” of whatever existence it proclaims. As a local eruption of this unbreakable thought, the song is, at last, all that is solid, coherent, and real (9).⁸ Nothing else in the world is truly substantial. The doll, the dish, and the bone are only “shapes.” As the ex-priest tells Billy, “stones themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived” (The Crossing 158). This is why the ex-priest insists that only the song—the corrido—has the power to make meaninglessness coalesce into a world.

“Corrido,” from the Spanish correr, may be literally translated as “running” or “flowing,” but the term specifically refers to a Mexican folk ballad, typified by a romantic approach to heroic figures and episodes both in history and in the present day. Evolving from various forms of Spanish poetry, the corrido rose to its greatest prominence during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. As corridos in this period focused primarily on the events that defined the armed struggle of the lower classes, the corrido came to be understood as presenting an alternative version of events to those published in state- and party-controlled newspapers. In this manner, the corrido has come to be seen as a voice of the “people,” that is, the lower-class majority. Ramon Saldivar, in his study on the corrido in Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference, suggests that the corrido behaves as a manifestation of a community’s beliefs, hewn down to a clear and single voice.

The corrido, in other words, is an art form that creates the manner by which it is understood, presenting in its enunciation the truth of the community. This truth thereby governs and provides meaning to the community, determining within it that which is true and false, right and wrong. While Saldivar’s corrido should not necessarily be confused with McCarthy’s incarnation, in The Crossing the corrido is described most concretely as “the poor man’s history,” owing allegiance not to the “truths of history,” but to the “truths of men” (386). In either sense, the corrido is a form of art through which a community participates in the fashioning of its own identity outside of any governing force, even time. When a given corrido is sung in such a community, it is not the effect of some transcendental truth, but rather the physical embodiment of a mode of thought particular to the community, residing nowhere other than in the moment of its expression. As The Crossing would have it, the corrido has no “abode or place” in the world, “except in the telling only” (143).

If the corrido is an example of a community identifying and reifying itself through a form of art, we can then say that from within such a community, a logical analysis of the nature of the art form is not merely impossible but antithetical to the notion of the community. It is in this sense that Badiou understands the song as participating in—and thereby inaccessible to—the thought of a world that it founds and anchors. Existing at the limit of a notion of time that it has itself inaugurated, the song stands at the very edge of life, appearing as a gateway to whatever might lie beyond.

One Death in Two Worlds

McCarthy has famously said that he does not understand authors who do not “deal with … life and death” (Brickner), and death is without question the empty center around which The Crossing spins. Death is, in fact, the “only order” (The Crossing 45), a silent void that not only provides the shape of life, but the very justification and meaning for its movement.

In “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” Lacan works through the concept of life and death—what he calls the “myth of the dyad”—in the interest of illustrating how subject comes to know itself through language (Ecrits 100). For Lacan, death is primarily the “limit of the subject’s historical function.” It should not be understood as “the possible end date of person’s life,” but is instead “the past in its real form.” “Death” is not a position beyond or outside of life, but is instead the structuring principle of life, since the anticipation of death governs to a large degree a subject’s living behavior. “Death” is a term that represents a meditation upon the inevitability of the extinction of life that thereby brings such a life into focus. The link between that foreground and background is understood here as a suddenly realized distance between the two terms of “death” and “life.” And yet such a dyad is a “myth,” Lacan tells us, because there is a third position that allows us to ponder the relationship of the dyad in the first place. Lacan’s procedure, aimed to illustrate the effects of discourse, nevertheless involves dismissing the brute fact that the word “death” signifies in favor of following the function of the term “death” in discourse. The problem arises in that the brute fact has retreated into a further silence, now stripped even of its signifying term. Death becomes merely one half of a dialectic, its genuine finality dismissed or ignored.

The Crossing overcomes this impasse by distilling these conceptions down to a single point and working through not only the manifestations of language, but also through the fictional presentation of a larger and uncodified existence in which language operates. These two realities are presented as the world of man and the world of the wolf.

We are repeatedly presented in The Crossing with varying conceptions of the “world.” The dying trapper Don Arnulfo offers the initial version when Billy questions him about the nature of wolves. In an attempt to capture the solitary wolf killing his family’s cattle, Billy has found a blended scent, a “Matrix” made by the vanished hunter Echols to bait his traps (The Crossing 17). Arnulfo suggests first that Billy’s failure in the use of Echols’s matrix may be a result of misappropriation. “Each hunter must have its own formula,” Arnulfo tells Billy (45). Arnold suggests that Echols’s formula lacks ultimate potency because it is in the end a manipulation of reality and not reality itself, that the vanished hunter’s “potions” are “black magic, perversions of the natural world” (220). Arnulfo’s comments on the nature of such a world in opposition to that of man reinforce this understanding. Even if Billy were to trap the wolf, Arnulfo tells him he would have no more than teeth and fur (“dientes y forro”) (45).⁹ This is because the wolf is a thing of the world itself, a world that is “breath only” and of which man is ultimately ignorant (46). Such a world lies between the “acts and ceremonies” of man, and Arnulfo insists that man is forbidden from “seeing” this world (46). Man may at best only move around it, taking note of the “acts” his “own hands” make upon it, and formulating little more than a “name” he would use to describe such things to other men (46).

While both man and wolf are undoubtedly violent creatures, Arnulfo claims that man is incapable of grasping the “seriousness” associated with his violence (46). The wolf, however, understands the “great order” of the world, its only order, is “that which death has put there” (45). The world of the wolf, organized as it is by death, is a world of blood and power, governed by the capability to enact and to resist destruction. This is a world in which the “matríz will not help” (47). In order to catch the wolf, Arnulfo tells Billy that he must instead find a place where the acts of God and the acts of man are “of a piece” (47). To locate this place, Billy must move in a world organized only by the fact of death. If man were truly capable of behaving in this way, he could then perhaps recognize and truly embody the deeper nature of his existence. It is a nature invisible to man himself, but one which McCarthy provides from the vantage of the wolf, who sees man as his eternal enemy a “malignant” and “insatiable” “lesser god,” “whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood” (17). Immeasurably worse than his own self-conception, the text here suggests that man’s blindness to the world is a result of his inability to come to terms with his own inherent evil.

In any event, as man’s nature is invisible to him, the world as it is remains invisible as well. Incapable of interacting directly with this world, man must instead supplement this world with the “acts” of his hands and the “ceremonies” of his names (47). For Don Arnulfo, the shadow world of man and his language exists around the actual world, the core of existence that is ultimately the work of God. Billy asks how such a place where “the acts of God and man are of a piece” may be found (47). Arnulfo responds that this place may be found where the arc of man and the arc of God intersect, and it is there that “God sits and conspires in the destruction of that which he has been at pains to create” (47). A place where, we may say, death is made.

Certainly man is as mortal as the wolf, but what differentiates the world of man from that of the wolf resides less in the presence and role of death than in the understanding of it, the explanation of it and the speaking and showing of it. Such an accurate, or true, speaking and showing of death would thereby provide the meaning and the justification of the life that moves around it. While Lacan suggests that “death” is preeminently a term through which the subject organizes its life, The Crossing demonstrates Lacan’s point while going further on to retain the brute fact of death through the consideration of separate regimes of experience existing simultaneously. These regimes are arranged in a hierarchical manner, with the wolf’s regime matching more closely to that of God’s due its absence of language. These various worlds principally—perhaps only—connect at the intersecting point of “death.” A genuine understanding of death would provide man a greater understanding not only of the wolf and of life but further, of God. Yet it is the sophistication of the language which governs man’s thought that removes him from any understanding of the fact of death. Such an understanding cannot be brought about through a discursive enquiry, but only through a revelation beyond language.

The Dialectic of The Pensioner

While Billy is ultimately able to catch the wolf, he is indeed left with only teeth and fur, forced by a series of misfortunes to destroy the animal in Mexico. From this point on in the narrative, Billy’s adversities build upon one another in near Job-like proportions. Dealing with the murder of his parents and disappearance of his brother, Billy wanders northern Mexico, eventually finding himself in the house of a blind pensioner. As Billy tells the pensioner and his wife of his journey and its troubles, the woman begins to relate a story of her husband’s past and how he came to his blindness. The story is one of profound physical suffering and loss—a sequence of crushing negations—and contains a series of bitter injustices: the loss of sight, the murder of innocents, and the continued existence and prosperity of evil men.

In the course of the woman’s tale, she is forced to watch her brother’s warrantless execution and learns that it is unwise to “expect too much of justice in this world” (288). Billy breaks in at this moment of the story, compelled to ask the blind man what he makes of such a statement. This question disturbs the woman, who stops the tale and suggests they should all retire to sleep, but here the blind pensioner finally speaks, admitting that he has given the issue of injustice much thought.

The pensioner suggests that the recognition of injustice is merely the true desire for something else that should exist, something that would carry the name of “justice.” Yet such a desire is, he says, merely evidence that “every tale” is “a tale of dark and light” (292). If we understand “dark and light” not as opposites but instead as a single thesis—a tale—of order, we see that the dark is not necessarily evil but is instead a functioning element of the tale and key to its order. This, the pensioner says, is the natural behavior of men’s thought: it works (albeit “slowly for the dullness of his tools”) through its demonstrations until it reaches the limits of what man can “speak” (292). But there is a further order of which men do not speak, a horror done by “wicked” men, who know that to move outside of the tale is to move outside of speaking, in a place where such wickedness may be “forever hidden” (293). Worse than the darkness of the tale is the antithesis of the tale, a disassembling of order into meaninglessness. The blind man says that such a dissembling is an act of evil, presenting as it does “the thing itself,” a place where “all is plain, light and dark alike” (293).

While the trapper Don Arnulfo confronts Billy with the point toward which the young man must aim his endeavor if he is to grasp the true nature of existence, Arnulfo provides no method by which to achieve this aim other than the admonition to think and move as the wolf does, outside of language, circling around the single ordering principle of death. Trapped and defined as man is by language, this proves to be a compelling but impossible endeavor. The pensioner, however, begins to work through language itself toward the principles of its composition. Beginning with the thesis of justice and antithesis of injustice (renaming these positions “light” and “dark”), the pensioner synthesizes these two positions into the “order” of the tale, which is immediately opposed to “disorder.” To bring about disorder is an evil act, insofar as it undoes the order of the tale, but further, this disorder is also “the thing itself,” the point beyond which reason cannot go because there is no difference to be found within it. “All is plain,” here, light and dark are the same, and reason cannot structure itself in the uniformity of the chaos. Because of this, disorder cannot be synthesized. Appalled by the ultimate meaningless of being, man begins to struggle against this chaos by following what pensioner calls the “path of righteousness” (293). Such a path demands that man attempt to fashion meaning out of nothing other than his own desire. While to legitimately overcome an antithesis requires formulating a synthesis from the two originary terms, the “path of righteousness” is an attempt to formulate an antithesis to “disorder,” already an antithesis itself. As this “path” is not a synthesis, it cannot lead to new thought; it therefore becomes not an oppositional term to “disorder,” but an amplification of it.

In his desire to counter disorder, the righteous man is led to assert a higher or greater order, an all-encompassing Order, which he will seek to impose not merely on the evil man and the disorder he reveals, but on “things which rightly have” no order at all (293). The righteous man “will call upon the world itself to testify as to the truth of what are in fact but his desires.” He will demand that the world entire conform to his Order, which has no proof of its existence other than the words the righteous man would employ to identify it. This righteous man acts in accordance with his own words alone, and in order to enact words that have no connection to the nature of things, the righteous man is inevitably led to “indemnify” his words “with blood” (293). But as nothing that exists in the world corresponds to these words of Order, the righteous man enters into an escalating cycle of violence that must claim everything in its path until it claims the righteous one himself. This is his inevitable fate because what the righteous man ultimately seeks is the submission of the world entire to a desire that has no other solidity than the language used to name it. It is not real.

The blind pensioner tells us here that, regardless of man’s belief, pure signifiers have no direct relation to the natural state of things. The ideal they represent is man’s alone, and as one man seeks the submission of the disordered world to his language, he is fated to live out the fact that such an ideal is ultimately imaginary. The blind pensioner goes on to echo Don Arnulfo’s position on language, saying that the words that were “given to man to help him make his way in the world,” also have “the power to blind him” (293), but, athletic dialectician that the pensioner is, he foresees even this position. Returning to the word “justice,” the point of departure for this entire meditation, the pensioner goes so far as to say that the evidence of a greater order—evidence even of the presence of God—should not be sought out in human words, or even in human perceptions. “The world which [man] imagines,” he tells Billy, “will come to naught but dust before him,” and it is in this very dust, composed of everything a man can touch and see, that he may find evidence of something greater than justice. That these things fall away is the very evidence of the “blessing of God” (293).

Billy asks him how such a thing could be a blessing. The pensioner replies that “[b]ecause what can be touched falls into dust there can be no mistaking these things for the real. At best they are only tracings of where the real has been” (294). Here the blind man stops, as does Billy, and McCarthy has brought an end to the discussion through the discovery—the uncovering—of a new word. “Justice,” and the world in which it operates has been posited, explored, and emptied. The dialectic has moved through light and dark, disorder and order, violence and self-destruction. It goes even further, crumbling to dust all human manifestations of the world itself, and it is at this point that the real emerges, standing between the mind of man and the blessings of God. While the righteous man attempts in futility to force language onto the world, the blind pensioner demonstrates that it is the artificiality of language itself that must be forced.

McCarthy presents here a conception of the real that is not within man’s world, otherwise it too would fall into dust. But neither does the real reside in another world altogether. The real passes on the edge of the world, and the world that man may see and touch bears the marks of its passing. The real is not another world, nor is it a singular thing. It is typified here as an act, a passage, as something flowing by on the edge of thought. If the pensioner walks us through the world of man, splitting such a world with his dialectical “work” until he uncovers its real and founding principle, Don Arnulfo has already provided another—the Other—world, which is a world of the wolf, a world structured by the survival of the strong and the death of the weak. In an attempt to reconcile these two visions we are forced to locate, much as Billy, the interface between the wolf’s world, void of language, and the world of man, structured and sustained by language. It is a place where we would be obliged to speak about the destruction of speech, to think about the end of thought. Such a place must be a point at which the defect of language, its very artificiality, is forced, exposed and made real. It is the place where man must stop talking.

The Corrido of the Güerito

Listen to the corrideros of the country. They will tell you. … The shape of the road is the road. There is not some other road that wears that shape but only one. And every voyage begun upon it will be completed.

—the crossing 230

After speaking with the pensioner, Billy finds Boyd recuperating at the house of a local doctor. Boyd refuses to leave with his brother and after a few days disappears again, this time with a Mexican girl. Billy returns home but remains aimless, finally journeying back south in an effort to find his brother once more. It is some time after this, in a small mountain town, that Billy first hears the corrido of the güerito, which seems to tell of his brother’s death. “He asked the corridero who was this joven of which he sang, but he only said that it was a youth who sought justice. … The corridero … toasted the memory of all just men in the world for as it was sung in the corrido theirs was a bloodfilled road and the deeds of their lives were writ in blood which was the world’s heart’s blood and he said that serious men sang their song and their song only” (375). The corrido is described here as a song that honors the memory of the dead through a recitation of their just and bloody deeds. It is through its record of just behavior and the inevitable death that accompanies it that the corrido becomes a meditation on the nature of death itself. The corrido is, then, a song of death, given its shape by justice.

Some time later, Billy hears another version of the song sung by a Mexican girl in a courtyard:

Village of BachinivaApril was the monthArmed horsemenArrived, the sixIf he was afraidYou couldn’t see it in his faceSo many comingThe fair oneawaits them

(381, Campbell translation)

Billy asks the girl what happens next, but she tells him she knows no other verses, although she does know that the story is quite old. The white boy and his girl, she tells Billy, die in each other’s arms, and the people carry their bodies away and bury them in secret. It is not until Billy meets the Yaqui Indian, Quijada, that Billy finally learns the details of his brother’s death.

While many people tried to help Boyd during his time in Mexico, Quijada tells Billy that Boyd proved to be impossible. “He didnt want to be taken care of,” says Quijada. “He wanted to shoot people” (385). Boyd was childish and reckless, eventually killing two men in the town of Galeana. “No one,” Quijada says, “knows why” (384). It also remains unclear who eventually killed Boyd in turn.

Billy asks Quijada about the corrido of the güerito and what it may tell about his brother’s murder. It “tells all and it tells nothing,” Quijada responds. The corrido is about Boyd as well as about something larger and older than a single boy. “I heard the tale of the güerito years ago,” Quijada continues, “[b]efore your brother was even born.” Billy asks Quijada if he believes the corrido of the güerito is truly about his brother and Quijada answers yes, but he goes further to say that the corrido is not beholden to the facts about Boyd or even of his death. “It tells what it wishes to tell. It tells what makes the story run. The corrido is the poor man’s history. It does not owe its allegiance to the truths of history but to the truths of men. It tells the tale of that solitary man who is all men” (387). The emphasis here is less on the particulars of Boyd’s life and death than it is on the “truths” conveyed by the song of the corrido. These are not the truths of a temporal sequence, but are immortal truths of humanity, a truth now presented in the figure of Boyd and through the singing of the corrido. And what is this truth? Quijada says that it is nothing other than “whenever two men meet, one of two things can happen and nothing else. In the one case a lie is born and in the other death” (386). “That sounds like death is the truth,” responds Billy, and he is absolutely correct. In the situation inscribed by the corrido, in the world that it traces, death is the truth. This is the very proclamation of the world of the wolf brought into language in a manner that identifies death while elevating it into the immortality of the artwork. The corrido tells Billy what death is by giving it meaning. In so doing, it is the truth.

In order for an artwork to tell the truth about life, it must delineate the difference between life and its opposite. In the act of its singing, the corrido defines this life, tracing the border between it and its inevitable conclusion of death, acting as limit and buffer between the presence of the living world and the silence of the untranslatable infinite in which it lies. The song is one and the same time the shelter of the living world from dissolution, as well the “immanent and created,” proclamation of an untestable truth (Handbook 23). The guiding point of death that Don Arnulfo has established from the beginning, and which the blind pensioner has worked toward through the vicissitudes of language, here finds its enunciation in the song that provides the definition of death. Quijada presents Billy with the artwork itself—the undeniable structure of the corrido—as a real shape hanging, or singing, in the silence of being.

As the ex-priest tells Billy early on, the corrido can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place. What the corrido of the güerito does, specifically, is make the world cohere into a place. It does so by transforming language from a vehicle of thought that may be debated and reconsidered into a vehicle of “pure affirmation” (Handbook 17). The corrido of the güerito explains nothing. It is not that which “links and deduces,” but is instead that which proclaims a “lawless proposition”: that when two men meet, the only truth is that of death. The corrido therefore gives birth to death, flowing on the threshold of not merely the sayable, but the thinkable itself, binding together the infinite elements of the doll, the dish and the bone into a world in which contains “all else” within it, and “of the telling there is no end” (The Crossing 142).

As it sings death, the corrido of the güerito proclaims the truth of the world of the wolf, in which the only order is indeed that which death has put there. As man moves in harmony with the corrido he approaches ever more closely the world of the wolf, dominated as it is by blood. It is through the corrido that man can, in fact, come to terms with his true nature: that of an “insatiable” and “malignant lesser god” (The Crossing 17). Singing the truth of man and world, the corrido flows at the intersection of meaning and chaos, at the very place where God sits and conspires in the destruction of that which he has been at pains to create. Stronger than stones and sharper than teeth, the corrido cannot crumble into dust or melt into the air. It is, at last, all that is real.

Such a reading of the corrido and the function of the artwork in the universe demarcated by the boundaries of the text provides a clear explanation as to why Billy Parham—silent, thoughtful, dogged—is destined to suffer repeatedly at the hands of a universe that destroys all he holds dear. The elevation of his contentious brother Boyd into a figure of myth tells us that in the world of The Crossing, only he who rages properly and with honor against the world that would deny him may arrive at the place the world has always already prepared for his insatiable, malignant kind. The story must be this way, the ex-priest tells us, because “there is only one to tell” (143).

But while this may be the message of the corrido, I believe the text of The Crossing may work to affect the pass of another idea altogether, and it is in this sense that we may come to imagine how The Crossing could be understood as a corrido of its own. In the closing paragraphs of the book, Billy, angry and bitter at his outrageous misfortune, is caught on the road in bad weather. Finding a hovel by the side of the road, Billy realizes it is the den of a lame and mangled dog. Chasing the dog out into the storm so that he may sleep along, Billy hears the animal run out into driving rain, howling with a sound “not of this earth” (424).

In the false dawn, Billy rises and walks out into the road and calls for the dog. He calls and calls, and of course the dog is gone. Overcome, Billy breaks down there weeping, and the text tells us that after a time the natural sun “did rise, once again, for all and without distinction” (426). Without the corrido’s distinction between the just and the unjust, without the wolf’s distinction between the quick and the dead. There is another—the possibility of another—truth, and Billy realizes this in his gut at the end of the book. As to what regime of meaning such a truth would engender, we are left only to wonder.

But if we can imagine ourselves to have passed, or to have been led through, the wolf’s notion of survival, man’s notion of meaning, the evil preoccupation with disorder and the righteous obsession with Order until finally grasping the truth of an honorable death as proclaimed by the immortal work of art, we should ask ourselves what the dialectician would oppose to such a violent and bloody notion of life.

I believe that readers of The Crossing are asked, in its last scene especially, to move with the art of the text in order to overcome the righteous nihilism of previous formulations. It is here on the empty road, as Billy suffers through a simple and profound remorse, that McCarthy lights up, for a moment, the possibility of another way to be in the world, a way brought the face of things by the text alone, and absent the hand of a god who would condone or dismiss it.