Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier

3. "The Acts of Their Own Hands”: Borders, Otherness, and Identity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing

“     ” | 59   The Acts of Their Own Hands” Borders, Otherness, and Identity in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing [W]e have never been as aware as we now are of how oddly hybrid historical and cultural experiences are, of how they partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, cross national boundaries, defy the police action of simple dogma and loud patriotism.   U nlike All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing met with mixed reactions from critics. Denser, more complex, and much darker in vision (though hardly rivaling the apocalyptic horror of Blood Meridian ), The Crossing continues McCarthy’s exploration of myths and their relationship to culture and identity.Blood Meridian looked at how myths shape cultures through shaping their history and providing guidelines for how cultures will view themselves and their worlds. All the Pretty Horses, in turn, offered a vision of how the individual must struggle to live in the world his or her cultural myths have created. The Crossing moves even deeper into metaphysical questions about the role of myths as shapers of cultures and cultures as shapers of identity, especially in a world increasingly hybridized and globalized. I will argue that, much as Theodore Roosevelt moved the historic frontier and its accompanying myth out of the realm of the physical and geographic and into the far more potent realm of political symbolism ,McCarthy moves the Mexican American borderlands out of the Southwest (or el norte, depending on your point of view) and into the equally potent and dangerous realm of human identities. Through the doubled figures of Billy and Boyd, the frontiers they cross, and the borderlands they inhabit, McCarthy explores a liminal space both actual and metaphorical in which subjectivity and identity are immanently self-reflexive and shifting. “ 60 |   The Crossing deliberately invokes the iconography and mythic underpinnings of the classic Western in order to subvert and utilize them in questioning the power of borders, the pollution of those who cross them, and their roles in the structuring of identity and Otherness on the level of the national and the personal. The genre of the Western, containing as it does a sort of ready-made insistence concerning questions of liminality, identity, and conquest, has not often, before McCarthy, fully realized those possibilities. The problems of constructing a genre built around such disturbing sites have been discussed at length by many critics. Henry Nash Smith outlined the contradictions of the Western novel as western in Virgin Land, claiming that by the publication of the Deadwood Dick series in , the hero of the Western novel had been transformed “from a Leatherstocking with an infallible sense of right and wrong and feelings which‘appeared to possess the freshness and nature of the forest’ into a man who had once been a bandit” (), and finally into a Pinkerton-type detective who had ceased to be truly “western.” These changes in the character of the Western hero, along with the growing popularity of improbable Amazon heroines who could ride,shoot,and curse with the men,resulted,according to Smith,in theWestern losing“whatever chance it might once have had to develop social significance” (). The inherent paradox,as he defined it,is that while the Leatherstocking character and those like him were objects of great popular interest,they were nonetheless loners, men who cut themselves off from significant interaction with their societies, and therefore a genre built around such a character could never adequately establish any truly complex or meaningful relationship with its society, any more than could the sensational though equally antisocial gunfighter-bandits of later works. At the same time, he wrote, the theme of “communion with nature in the West proved too flimsy to sustain a primitivistic literature of any magnitude” (). The pollution of those Western characters who left their own societies to cross the social, racial, and/or geographic boundaries of the frontier or who chose to willingly inhabit the liminal spaces of borderlands proved too challenging for most writers to deal with other than in a dime-novel format.Ironically , this development served a dual purpose. The inherent issues involved in Western novels (power and pollution, cultural, racial, and class conflicts, conquest and colonization of native cultures and the natural world) proved fascinating to the American public, but their generally facile treatment allowed the genre to become both immensely popular and influential in shaping and reflecting public attitudes and at the same time allowed for the mask- [3.140.185.123] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 05...