Yamaguchi Kazuhiko

From the perspective of “authoritarianism,” we find that Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2006) foregrounds the collapse of the self-image of “America” that became the hegemonic power in the twentieth century. No Country portrays the world of “drug-war capitalism,” which can be seen as the ultimate outcome of the collapse of “liberal modernism,” a worldview that encompasses “individual freedom, market competition, democratic government, human rights, dominance by law, nationalistic institution, pursuit of happiness by techno-economic growth, and progressive view of history.” No Country provides a negative view of the contemporary “authoritative” America that led the “liberal modernism,” which, in turn, became the driving force for the “drug-war capitalism.” The narrative of No Country, however, functions as a highly ethical one that reconfigures “America” beyond the dualistic perspective of the conservative vs. the liberal. This paper interprets how the relation between “authority” and the “ethics” is actualized in the protagonist Ed Tom Bell’s characterization, focusing on the motifs of cultural war, country, violence, and law, among others. The world of “drug-war capitalism” depicted in No Country historicizes the relation of violence and capitalism of the globalized “America.” The frontier myth generated the idea of “regeneration through violence” of America, which, in turn, had supported the self-image of “America” as the “gun-fighter nation” that kept bearing “the ethos of violence.” In No Country, however, the sheriff, Bell, does not represent such an “America” that monopolizes “the right to violence” and “the right to wealth,” but embodies the “America” that does not conform to such a self-image. Bell’s characterization reflects the end of the authoritative “gun-fighter nation,” and demonstrates his deep doubts about “America” with which he has identified himself. Accordingly, Bell’s monologues, which are put in the heads of each chapter, bear the tone of melancholic self-dialogues, but his eventual self-denial leads to a newly generated ethics. In this context, No Country demonstrates the “responsible” ethical decision as something that paradoxically arises when loyalty to “nation” and “community” collapses. It is in this sense that Bell radically denies himself at the end of the narrative, and, in doing so, escapes from the yoke of self-image of the authoritative “America” that complicitly aligns with the world of “drug-war capitalism.” Ruthless rationality of the “drug-war capitalism” defeats “conservative” Bell, who appears as a useless old man. His figure, however, stands as a highly ethical “American” subject that keeps creating alternative selves open to the unknowable future and the “Other” beyond the fatalistic present and the fixed concept of “authority.”