The West/ern and Frontier Mythology in No Country for Old Men

Résumé En

No Country for Old Men is a work whose genre is difficult to pin down. Sara Spurgeon recalls in her introduction to Cormac McCarthy that the novel has been alternately read as "urban Western, detective fiction, hard-boiled, noir, and even horror". 2 The film too has elicited various responses as to its generic identity (for instance, the comments of the cast and crew in the DVD bonus material which include horror, crime, Western, noir, or comedy). This generic hybridity invites critics and audiences to what Lynnea Chapman King calls a "search for genre", 3 compelling readers and viewers to actively engage with a definition of what the novel and film are or can be. This hybridity present in the novel finds a perfect match in the Coen brothers' approach to genre, which "epitomiz[es] genre as 'a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy […] a sort of participation without belonging". 4 In discussions on the generic identity of No Country, two genres seem to prevail: the Western and the hard-boiled crime. 5 If these genres are generally quite different in terms of setting and period, they frequently converge and overlap in their reliance on, and exploration of, frontier mythology. 6 Keeping in mind that, when it comes to genre, hybridity trumps identity in No Country, this chapter focuses on the mobilization and rewritings of the Western genre and frontier mythology in both novel and film. Some of these rewritings come from the hybridization of the Western with hard-boiled crime fiction, while others question the Western and frontier myth from within. I first discuss the debt of No Country to the Western genre and how the text and its filmic adaptation draw on the genre's conventions and