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Epilogue One of the story lines in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men narrates the apparitions of an elusive and mortifying hitman named Anton Chigurh, who roams the area around the Texas-Mexico border. Chigurh was after a simple man named Llewelyn Moss, who happened upon a drug crime scene while out hunting in the desert, and who made the unwise decision to take a satchel full of money from one of the dead bodies he found. Chigurh, as the reader comes to discover, is no ordinary hitman, but a unique form of morality, with a worldview onto his own. After murdering Moss, Chigurh’s last crime before he disappears is the murder of Carla, Moss’s wife. Before he shoots her, he explains to the desperate woman how there can be only one outcome to their meeting, because he is the kind of person who has “only one way to live.” “You can see what a problem that must be for [people],” he says. “How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of.”1 The strangeness of Chigurh’s fatal enunciation is made even more puzzling by this description of who he is as that which others “refuse to acknowledge.” When, toward the end of the novel, Ed Tom Bell (the sheriff who has been unable to catch Chigurh) tells a county prosecutor that the hitman is “pretty much a ghost,” the reader follows Bell in his realization that any attempt to know this ghost will be futile. Like Bell, we realize that Chigurh is an excess of this tale—the question that people “may very well not be equal to” (299). Throughout No Country for Old Men, Chigurh insists on describing himself as a problem that is both unexpected and incommensurable. Having finally recognized this, Bell calls that problem “a ghost.” As readers of McCarthy’s text, we are invited to participate in the observation of this 180 / epilogue limit of perception. Like Bell, we remain troubled by Chigurh’s haunting, which here comes to mean an incompleteness of understanding. The book closed, we continue to ask what McCarthy is doing by forcing us to reckon with this problem and this ghost, as well as this depiction of a landscape we think we know. Chigurh’s apparitions throughout the complex area of the border serve only to make him a transnational conundrum, a problem within a landscape with a haunted past and ongoing present.2 The U.S.-Mexico border has been and is the locus of perhaps the darkest episodes of what we call “hemispheric American relations.” Extrapolating somewhat, we could well say that, like Chigurh, this border is the event and object that citizens of the Americas cannot equal. It is the site that waits to be made answerable, where the limits of American imagined communities are jealously guarded and violently enforced. Not surprisingly, academic considerations within this particular area of study continuously return to that open and divisive wound (to recall Gloria Anzaldúa). Critics from Amy Kaplan to José David Saldívar have maintained that the border as symbol and geography has been essential in the move toward a transnationalization of American studies.3 This site is thus not only the exacerbation of the question of transnationalism in the Americas. It is also the haunted and haunting core where American cultures come to terms with the border as a multiplication of difference. Despite this traumatic geography that spells out an impasse for the Americas, we should be careful not to allow a crippling conception of difference to inform our readings of literature from the hemisphere. There are several ways in which such readings that highlight divergence can be detrimental . In the past decades, critics have at times fetishized the production of their cultural others, and their contributions have run the danger of turning their objects of study into sublime figures of a dehistoricized, alternative modernity. Although “alternative” may be a useful term that describes, for example, the redemptions Western readers find in the works emerging from different cultural quarters, it should not cloud our understanding of the commonalities to be found when studying global modernities . In recent years, scholars of transnational American studies (many of whom I have referred to throughout this book) have demonstrated the innovative ways in which the Americas can be brought together in productive conversations without occluding the features that make each culture, each language, and each text distinct. In my own discussion, I...

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