ABSTRACT
In a time nearly mythical, but then disorientatingly specied as just prior to World War II, a white boy in New Mexico seeks to free a wolf. No premise could be more simple, no relation between a subject and his desire more clear. Yet no matter how many times I have read Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing (1994) the experience has been one of disjunction. In the course of earlier readings, the rst of this remarkable novel’s four parts – the story of Billy Parham and the wolf – overshadowed the rest. The fact that this rst part was, as S.K. Robisch points out, published separately in Esquire magazine in July 1993 under the title ‘The Wolf Trapper’ demonstrates its relative self-sufciency, if not its original autonomy (Wallach, 288). On more recent readings the latter parts have predominated, both in my reading and in my memory. It is as if The Crossing is a novel which cannot be held as a whole in the reader’s imagination at the time of reading, or in the reader’s
memory when that rst encounter is remembered. One part, perhaps emboldened by the glossy autonomy of its rst appearance, almost seems to antagonize the other three; the later parts exist in an asserted but impossible independence of that which led up to them. Such a disjunctive effect has been registered by, for example, Peter Messent when he has commented on the foundational importance of incompatibility and narrative contradiction in McCarthy’s work (129). Though apparently composed under the sign of disjunction, The Crossing is also the most patterned, coherent, and musically thematic of novels, both within each of its four parts and in the relationship that exists between them. Phrases, gestures, and actions are repeated and patterned in a dense and lyrical weaving. In its rst section, Billy Parham, the novel’s hero, intends to ride north with the pregnant wolf he has captured and then, in a great, arbitrary, yet emotionally coherent moment decides to turn south to set her free. When, in Mexcio, the wolf is captured and baited by dogs for sport Billy leaves the hacienda heading south. He changes his mind and, echoing his earlier deciding action, heads north back to the hacienda in order to provide her with the death which is the only freedom now available to her.
