“I hope it has a nice endin”: Rewriting Postmodern Play in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men

Abstract

McCarthy's border fiction-to date, five novels including Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), Cities of the Plain (1998), and No Country for Old Men (2005)-demonstrates a committed interest in games and game playing. These works continually mobilize tarot cards, Monte and poker playing, chess, and coin flipping as harbingers of fate and chance as well as evidence of unique skill. Although relatively little is yet known about Cormac McCarthy's private life, conversations with McCarthy betray his sincere interest in games. Richard Woodward's 1992 New York Times Magazine interview locates McCarthy at a pool hall in a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, where he "ignores the video games and rock-and-roll and patiently runs out the table. A skillful player, [McCarthy] was a member of a team at this place, an incongruous setting for a man of his conservative demeanor" ("Venomous"). Thirteen years later, in a 2005 Vanity Fair interview accompanying the release of No Country for Old Men, Woodward reports that one of McCarthy's longtime friends is legendary poker champion Betty Carey, and that McCarthy's current hangout is no longer a noisy pool hall, but a perhaps equally unlikely location: the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. At the Institute, known as a "hub for complex-systems theory," McCarthy attends workshops on "bounded inferences for decision-making in games" and follows the work of leading thinkers in chaos theory, such as J. Doyne Farmer, the famed "economist-physicist-gambler" ("Cormac Country").In what follows, I will look closely at games and game playing as they figure formally as well as thematically in McCarthy's most recent addition to his border fiction, No Country for Old Men. I base my argument on the ideas of Jean-Francois Lyotard, whose sociocultural analyses have become central to postmodern studies. The McCarthy text, I argue, "rewrites" postmodern jouissance through a deferral of narrational and thematic resolution. The narrative's plotting, its logic and dynamic, exhibits a type of "play" by refusing to develop toward a proper resolution between opposing forces. In this sense of "play," No Country for Old Men embodies the optimistic qualities of "usefulness" Lyotard associates with Cold War game theory: "Game theory, we think, is useful in the same sense that any sophisticated theory is useful, namely as a generator of ideas" (Postmodern 60). Ultimately, the novel's adherence to game-theoretic logic as well as its expression of unresolved tension demonstrates the "rewriting" of postmodern play.Playing GodIn McCarthy's border fiction, games and game playing are often associated with the work of narrative production. The workings of chance concern not only players engaged in parlor games, but also the serious storytellers populating McCarthy's fiction as they carefully-and strategically-craft their tales. McCarthy's narrators construct stories of "biblical gravity" to emphasize issues of life and death-the hallmark, according to McCarthy, of all "good writers" (Woodward, "Venomous").Nowhere in McCarthy's border fiction are the concerns of gaming, death, and narrative production so prevalent as in No Country for Old Men.1 The plot focuses on Llewelyn Moss, a thirty-six-year-old welder and Vietnam War veteran from Sanderson, Texas, and the various parties searching for him after he accidentally finds the site of a botched heroin deal and a document case containing $2.4 million. The two principle characters in this search are Terrell County Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and a mysterious assassin named Anton Chigurh, whom Bell thinks of as "a true and living prophet of destruction" (No Country for Old Men 4). At the carnage-laden scene of the heroin deal, Moss encounters a wounded man, dehydrated and asking for water. Moss does not have water, nor does he offer the man any other form of succor, but instead continues his examination of the scene, determined to find "the last man standing" (15). …