Abstract
Shoop’s essay focuses on the US-Mexican border, a spatial category that is at once a specific territory, but that at the same time represents the deterritorialization of capitalism itself, embodied in the ceaseless flow of goods and services across the border zone. According to Shoop, McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and Winslow’s The Power of the Dog represent two very different approaches to the status of the border and efforts to map the effects of global capitalism, and US geopolitical ambitions, in crime fiction. While in No Country, the assassin Anton Chigurh seems like the inevitable by-product of the world of transnational capital flows and flexible accumulation that organizes economic activity along the border, the novel remains perplexed about how to account for the phenomenon of Chigurh and all he represents within the confines of traditional notions of law and order. Shoop argues that McCarthy’s novel is best understood as a conservative fantasy of violence in which the increasingly brutal acts perpetrated by Chigurh and others assume a transhistorical dimension, or efface social contextualization altogether. The Power of the Dog, by contrast, refuses to fix the figure of the criminal, and this enables Winslow to better map the systemic and historical dimensions of crime. In making visible the connections between individual criminal acts and the broader systems that abet them, Shoop argues that Winslow’s novel turns the southern border crime scene into a vast mirror to critically interrogate the related impulses of global capitalism and US geopolitical fantasies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
See Adams’ Continental Divides and Fox.
- 2.
See Berlant.
- 3.
See Woodward. As McCarthy himself puts it in the same interview: “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”
- 4.
See Cant for a book-length study of this connection.
- 5.
See Fluck for a cautionary diagnosis of the transnational turn in American studies.
- 6.
We should not forget that his employers call him a “loose cannon” (140), which suggests a less-than-ideal employee. Also, we are given a more tractable professional in the figure of Wells—who is quite successful by all standards except the one that matters most to the novel, namely, his confrontation with Chigurh.
- 7.
In his short book Violence, Slavoj Žižek makes a similar distinction between “subjective” and “objective” forms of violence. The explosive and often highly visible character of the former has the contradictory effect of concealing the systemic character of the latter.
- 8.
For an insightful reading of how Winslow’s novel demonstrates the limits of US sovereignty, see Pepper.
- 9.
One such ledger of the crimes of global capitalism has, in fact, been published. See Perrault.
Bibliography
Adams, Rachel. 2007. At the Borders of American Crime Fiction. In Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell, 249–273. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Print.
Adams, Rachel. 2009. Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Print.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2012. Borderlands/La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Print.
Berlant, Lauren. 2005. The Epistemology of State Emotion. In Dissent in Dangerous Times, ed. Austin Sarat, 46–78. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Print.
Braudy, Leo. 2008. Whose Country? Film Quarterly, 61(4). http://www.filmquarterly.org/2008/06/whose-country/
Cant, John. 2007. Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism. New York: Routledge. Print.
Fluck, Winifried. 2011. A New Beginning? Transnationalisms. New Literary History 42(3): 365–384. Print.
Fox, Claire F. 2003. Left Sensationalists at the Transnational Crime Scene: Recent Detective Fiction from the U.S.–Mexico Border Region. In World Bank Literature, ed. Amitava Kumar, 184–200. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Print.
Kim, Yoojin Grace. 2002. ‘Then They All Move on Again’: Knowledge and the Individual in Judge Holden’s Doctrine of War. In Cormac McCarthy, ed. Harold Bloom, 169–82. Philadelphia: Chelsea House. Print.
Malewitz, Raymond. 2004. ‘Anything Can Be an Instrument’: Misuse Value and Rugged Consumerism in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Contemporary Literature 50(4): 721–740. Print.
McCarthy, Cormac. 1985. Blood Meridian. New York: Vintage International. Print.
McCarthy, Cormac. 2005. No Country for Old Men. New York: Vintage International. Print.
Pepper, Andrew. 2011. Policing the Globe: State Sovereignty and the International in the Post-9/11 Crime Novel. Modern Fiction Studies 57(3): 401–424. Print.
Perrault, Gilles (ed.). 1998. Le Livre Noir du Capitalisme. Paris: Les Temps des Cerises. Print.
Phillips, Dana. 1996. History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. American Literature 68(2): 433–60. Print.
Pynchon, Thomas. 2006. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Harper Perennial. Print.
Seltzer, Mark. 2011. The Official World. Critical Inquiry 37(4): 724–753. Print.
Winslow, Don. The Power of the Dog. New York: Vintage Crime, 2005. Print.
Woodward, Richard P. 1992. Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction. New York Times. April 19.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence. London: Picador Press. Print.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shoop, C. (2016). The Scene of the Crime is the Crime: The Southern Border and the Representation of Violence in Cormac McCarthy and Don Winslow. In: Pepper, A., Schmid, D. (eds) Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-42573-7_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-42573-7_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-42572-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-42573-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)