Beautiful Description in The Crossing

Just a quick post to share this beaut of a sentence that I found in The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy.

"In that wild high country he'd lie in the cold and the dark and listen to the wind and watch the last few embers of his fire at their dying and the red crazings in the woodcoals where they broke along their unguessed gridlines. As if in the trying of the wood were elicited hidden geometries and their orders which could only stand fully revealed, such is the way of the world, in darkness and ashes. He heard no wolves. Ragged and half starving and his horse dismayed he rode a week later in the mining town of El Tigre."

Wow! I mean, just wow!

McCarthy's Use of the Complex Sentence

Still reading The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy. Got into part two and my reading just really slowed down. It's not that it isn't interesting, just that there is a ton to process. Here is a quote from part 2, page 129:

"They rode the high country for weeks and they grew thin and gaunted man and horse and the horse grazed on the sparse winter grass in the mountains and gnawed the lichens from the rock and the boy shot trout with his arrows where they stood above their shadows on the cold stone floors of the pools and he ate them and ate green nopal and then on a windy day traversing a high saddle in the mountains a hawk passed before the sun and its shadow ran so quick in the grass before them that it caused the horse to shy and the boy looked up where the bird turned high above them and he took the bow from his shoulder and nocked and loosed an arrow and watched it rise with the wind rattling the fletching slotted into the cane and watched it turning and arcing and the hawk wheeling and then flaring suddenly with the arrow locked in its pale breast."

If you have ever read McCarthy (or Faulkner, or Morrison for that matter) you know that he likes the long sentence. Part of his style. In this case I believe that McCarthy is using this to suggest that time is passing, but it seems that all of time is sloughing into itself. You cannot really tell when things are happening; it seems that it is all happening at once. All at one time. His use of the conjunction "and" accomplishes this task. The sentence isn't incorrect, just very long and drawn out. It helps the reader to feel the exhausting nature of this journey. And this happened, and this happened, and this happened. I don't think that most writers should use this style. This is reserved for those masters who are allowed to break the rules.

The Hero Cycle in The Crossing

One of the immediate things I noticed while reading the beginning of The Crossing was McCarthy's use of The Hero Cycle. So, I thought it would be interesting to analyze the events of the novel through this lens.

The Call to Adventure: Billy Parham's "call" comes early on in the novel. In the first few pages, Billy wakes in the middle of the night to the cries of wolves. He dresses, careful not to wake his little brother, and goes outside to follow the wolves, to watch them in their graceful circles. Their howling calls Billy. In that moment you can see Billy Parham dedicating himself to the wolf--that he will be intricately connected to these majestic creatures. But Billy's call doesn't end there. A short while later, Billy's father calls him to help trap the she-wolf that is eating members from their herd. This is the final moment of his call. Billy ultimately accepts the call to go out and interact with these animals.

1st Threshold: Billy crosses the border into the world of adventure in three places. One could interpret that his trips with his father are crossing a threshold. He goes out to experience the wild and find the she-wolf. Or, you could interpret the part when Billy goes out alone to track and trap the she-wolf without his father. Finally, the first threshold could be when Billy actually crosses the border into Mexico.

Mentor/Helper/Wise Old Man: Billy visits senor Echols during his journey to trap the she-wolf. Echols has scents that will attract the wolf and acts as almost a mystical helper for Billy. The fact that Echols speaks in Spanish adds to the mysticism. He gives Billy advice, but more than that he helps Billy to understand the nature of the wolf. That the wolf will be inextricable changed once Billy traps it. That to trap the wolf is to end the wolf. But he also knows that Billy will be changed in the process as well.

Sometimes you need to just stop and savor language.

This is one of those times. When we need to just stop and revel in the beauty of literature. Some quotes from McCarthy's The Crossing:

page 31--

"Before him the mountains were blinding white in the sun. They looked new born out of the hand of some improvident god who'd perhaps not even puzzled out a use for them. That kind of new."

page 45--

"He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there."

page 46--

"You catch the snowflake but when you look in your hand you don't have it no more. Maybe you see this dechado. But before you can see it it is gone. If you want to see it you have to see it on its own ground. If you catch it you lose it. And where it goes there is no coming back from. Not even God can bring it back."

Little Prediction:
I think that Billy is going to catch this stinking wolf that they have been tracking and trying to trap since the beginning and then he is going to want to keep the wolf. He will train the wolf to be a pet, domesticate the wolf. But then it really won't be a wolf anymore, will it? He will take the wolf out of the animal. He'll have a pretty wicked pet, but it won't be the same. Just like the snowflake McCarthy talks about. You can look at a snowflake, but once you touch it, once you catch it in the palm of your hand you change the snowflake forever. It cannot be undone and it is no longer a snowflake.

page 46--

"The wolf is made the way the world is made. You cannot touch the world. You cannot hold it in your hand for it is made of breath only."

See what I mean?

page 47--

"He said that the boy should find that place where acts of God and those of man are of a piece. Where they cannot be distinguished."

McCarthy and the Mundane

Beautiful passage on page 22 of The Crossing:

"He took the deerhide gloves our of the basket and pulled them on and with a trowel he dug a hole in the ground and put the drag in the hole and piled the chain in after it and covered it up again. Then he excavated a shallow place in the ground the shape of the trap springs and all. He tried the trap in it and then dug some more. He put dirt in the screenbox as he dug and hen he laid the trowel by and took a pair of c-clamps from the basket and with them screwed down the springs until the jaws fell open. He held the trap up and eyed the notch in the pan while he backed off one screw and adjusted the trigger. Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be truing some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such a space. If it be knowable. He put his hand under the open jaws and tilted the pan slightly with his thumb."

Couple of ideas here.

McCarthy excels at the complex compound sentence, like Faulkner and Morrison before him. His repetition of the conjunctions makes the sentence go on and on and on.

But at the end the image of a man bent against the shadowy sky, "fixing himself." That image is illuminating. Billy and his father are out setting traps to catch a wolf that is killing members of their herd. This "quest" (more on that later) is completing these men. Billy's father is becoming himself while doing this semi-mundane and pedestrian task--setting traps. But all of a sudden it becomes the most important task in the entire world. Maybe because he is passing knowledge on to his son. Or perhaps because man needs a quest; man needs something to do. Billy sees his father in a much more ancient light. Like he is some renaissance man measuring the universe. And why can't he be?

Coming Soon 3--I Changed My Mind

I can do that right?

So, I will save James Joyce for another day. It has been a long time since I have read McCarthy. I think I am going to enjoy this one immensely.