Cormac McCarthy, who died on June 13, 2023on the age of 89, is commonly characterised relatively narrowly as a southern authoror perhaps a southern Gothic author.
McCarthy leaned heavily on this his upbringing in Tennessee in his first 4 novels, and he set many others within the deserts of the American Southwest. As a author, nonetheless, he saw himself as a part of an intensive literary community stretching back to the Classical and Elizabethan periods, drawing on a wide range of genres, cultures and influences.
His unique and varied writing style has been in comparison with that of lots of the best writers of American letters, with scholars highlighting connections to their writings Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Tony Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Flannery O'Connor And William Faulkner.
As such a confusing list of compatriots suggests, McCarthy is a author who experimented with language and literary techniques. Each of his books typically differs radically from the previous one in tone, structure, and prose.
I'm currently working on a book tentatively titled How Cormac Works: McCarthy, Language, and Style. In it I trace McCarthy's lifelong commitment to fiddling with style, particularly his approach to storytelling and his techniques for conveying mood.
Two radically different reading experiences
Depending on the book—and even passages in specific books—McCarthy's writing will be characterised as minimalist, meandering, esoteric, humorous, frightening, pretentious, sentimental, or folksy.
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Some novels rely heavily on dense passages of narrative exposition and philosophizing, while others rely heavily on on a regular basis dialogue. Some books rejoice regional voices and vernacular, others adopt a neutral, distant, and clinical tone.
One can see McCarthy's literary range and stylistic experimentation in two of his most famous novels: “Blood meridian“, which got here out in 1985, and “The street“, which was released and filmed greater than twenty years later, in 2006 right into a film in 2009.
In “Blood Meridian,” set within the deserts of the southwestern United States and Mexico, McCarthy’s prose is dense and the main points pile up one after the opposite.
Take the famous scene by which a mercenary band of American scalp hunters encounters a gaggle of Comanche warriors:
“A legion of horrors, hundreds of them, half-naked or dressed in costumes from the attic or from the Bible or from a fever dream, with animal skins and silk jewelry and pieces of uniform with the blood of previous owners still on them, cloaks of the slain. ” Dragoons, cavalry jackets trimmed with frogs and braided, one with a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a blood-stained wedding veil and some in headdresses or crane feathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeon-tailed cloak worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conqueror. …”
The entire sentence is much too long to cite here. But you get the concept: there's little or no punctuation and there are few places to even take a breath.
The narrative in other moments of the novel catalogs the desert landscape of the western United States in similarly careful and boring—if beautiful—detail. The prose seems drawn out, slow, and repetitive, identical to the novel's subject: the westward expansion of the United States within the nineteenth century, a campaign of escalating destruction that McCarthy characterizes within the novel as “some heliotropic plague.”
“The Road,” a later novel that also embraces the concept of perpetual movement, couldn’t be more different in style, pace, and rhythm. The prose on this novel that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fictionis succinct and characterised by a linguistic restraint that is totally missing in “Blood Meridian”.
This novel just isn’t made up of dense and overwhelming passages, but relatively short and clear paragraphs separated by spaces and sometimes unrelated to what comes immediately before or after:
It was colder. Nothing moved in tonight world. An intense smell of wood smoke hung over the road. He pushed the cart through the snow. …
In his dream she was sick and he was taking good care of her. The dream looked like a sacrifice, but he thought otherwise. …
There are not any God-given men on this road. They're gone and I'm left and so they've taken the world with them. Question: How is never-being different from what never was?
Darkness of the invisible moon. The nights are only a bit of less black now. …
People sitting on the sidewalk at dawn, half-sacrificing and smoking of their clothes. Like failed sectarian suicides. …
Each paragraph on this passage differs in tone, theme, place, and time from what appears before and after it.
A long-lasting legacy
It could be tempting to view such a difference as a development by which McCarthy refined and tamed his narrative voice from his earlier works. But his last long novel “The passenger“, published in 2022, revisits the expansive prose harking back to McCarthy's great mid-career novels: “Suttree“ and “Blood Meridian”.
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Some readers find McCarthy's stylistic flourishes and experiments excessive—or, worse, pretentious. But they all the time appeared to me to reflect his love of words and the limitless possibilities of language.
In a blurb originally written for McCarthy's first novel: “The orchard keeper,, Ralph Ellison wrote“McCarthy is a writer to read, admire and, quite frankly, envy.”
When I learned of McCarthy's death, I couldn't help but consider that quote that marked the start of his profession and reflect on how right Ellison was to champion McCarthy's craft – the careful use of language that marked his work for six many years coined 12 novels.
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