Cormac McCarthys The Crossing: Demystifying American West through Bioregional Reinhabitation and Nomadic Border‐Crossing

Abstract

In this essay, I critically reexamine the scholarly works on Cormac McCarthys The Crossing, most of which have hitherto revolved around either the American West or the demystification of it, especially delving into the American frontier psychology often described with Manifest Destiny, and aim to formulate my own proposition that McCarthy attempts to demystify the American Western myths through the protagonist Billy Parhams nomadic border‐crossings across the Southwest borderline between the US and Mexico. It is my contention that the trajectory of Billys three bordercrossings suggests to us the emergence of his bioregionalism, or a way of life directed by human affection and ethical responsibility for the biotic community of a life place, which gradually erases the politically designated borderline and instead substitutes it with a more ecologically‐drawn cartography. The demystification of American West that The Crossing fulfills is also predicated upon McCarthys conceptualization of place and space, which eludes a more conventional dyad famously proposed by Yi‐Fu Tuan in Space and Place. McCarthy renders the Southwest borderland a conceptually fluid one in which place, space, and identity interact with one another, permeating through and beyond the conceptual boundaries among them. To explicate the concept of a fluid place depicted by McCarthy, I refer to such concepts as Heideggerian dwelling, Caseys idea of event, the nomadic bioregionalism, and the rhizomatic West, among others. In so doing, I aim to show how McCarthy destabilizes not only the political borderline but also the common dyads of humanity/alterity, contingency/ necessity, and place/space.