Someone who enjoys this please enlighten me or show me a way into McCarthy's prose using examples of what's good. I tried several times to read his novels and I'm sorry, but it's just terrible. It's hard to put my finger on what is so unappealing. The closest I can come to what is bad about it is that it reads like farce without humor (if you take 'farce' to be a question of tempo, as in "tragedy sped up"). The opening to Blood Meridian (his masterpiece, I'm told) is just this endless stream of backstory that The Kid is supposed to have done or been but no exposition of anything. It sounds like the imagination of a 13yo boy playing with his GI Joes or super heroes. The fragmentary style and purply-pulpish register is very hard to take seriously. Where's the beef? Please post some passages that don't sound like common pulp fiction, unless that's what people are crowing about, in which case...I got nothin'.
“Do you think we’re going to die?”
“No.”
“We’re not?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re carrying the fire.”
“What fire?”
“The fire inside. Goodness. That’s what we’re carrying.”
Not trying to piss on the fire but that's almost exactly the kind of thing I'm unable to enjoy. I guess I wonder "Who speaks like that?" It's wooden and affected to my ear. It comes across as needlessly obtuse. I'm not saying it's exceptional for that style, but to me it reads like so many YA fantasy novels from my youth, or maybe a /r/ for aspiring writers. If I'm being asked to work so hard to elucidate the symbolism or metaphorical content, then shouldn't I expect a little back in the form of beautiful English. If this were a poem (where obscurity is expected) I would say it's a meh poem just on the basis of not being very interesting. I get this is a father/son dialogue and maybe the terseness appeals to some, but I would ask those readers if that's how they talk to their own sons.
In the spirit of fairness, I found some fan favorites from /r/cormacmccarthy and if these are representative of his most powerful prose I don't know what to say:
"It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets."
A "heraldic tree...left afire"? That's, er, not good. It's actually bad. And "auxiliaries routed(?) forth into the inordinate(?) day"? This is like the guy in the Community Arts writing class who gets a lot of praise but could really use an editor.
And the 'ands' are just interminable. And this and that and the other thing and one more and something totally different but also this and that. Good lord, someone give this man a period, or even a semi-colon. Here's another exemplar of a sentence that runs on more than the horses in it.
"That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wild flowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow far as the eye could see and in the dream he was among the horses running and in the dream he himself could run with the horses and they coursed the young mares and fillies over the plain where their rich bay and their rich chestnut colors shone in the sun and the young colts ran with their dams and trampled down the flowers in a haze of pollen that hung in the sun like powdered gold and they ran he and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised."
"that resonance which is the world itself" is just royal purple prose.
I apologize for disliking something others like, it doesn't seem fair, but I get the feeling that Cormac McCarthy is one of those "favorites" for people who don't have a lot to compare it to. Anytime someone tells me their favorite author is Cormac McCarthy, I'm always tempted to ask, "Who's your second favorite?"
I really liked the long run on sentence about the horses you pasted in. It's lyrical and preachy, maybe a little breathless. It drones and twirls like dervish
I found it broke down
In my head
Into verses
Alternating
Between a few
And several syllables each
And lo!
I heard it sung
By Bono
By Jim Morrison
By Johnny Cash and David Byrne
Each having
His own band
Accompaniment
Alike unto his kind.
I can't really represent it as I experienced it. But the prose really lent itself to some of the more epic pop music in my head.
It was a minute of cinema piped directly into my mind. Quite a treat. Thank you for dereferencing them!
Having said all that, it's still a cheap shot of dopamine that leans heavily on this reader to pick and layer his own poisons for effect.
I'd dare say another reader more skilled in poetry might be able to dice it into various meters and recite to different types of music.
Werner Herzog's voice, pronunciation, and pacing are fun to use to read these
Appreciate your sharing your experience. I can hear Jim Morrison's incantatory rhythms as you point out..."Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding. Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind."
But as you point out, you're bringing a lot to the equation. If all we had were Jim Morrison's lyrics they wouldn't be that interesting. He just wasn't that great of a poet compared to what's available in English poetry. Without the music it doesn't have much magic.
A more irrecoverable criticism is if something lends itself to parody. My sense is McCarthy's prose style is extremely parodyable. How could one distinguish between it and something an LLM generates? Not in the fragmentary incantatory cadence or questionable semantics. Not in the meaning, or the symbolic and metaphoric content? So where then?
Ah, yeah... It makes sense for why the publications push certain writers, but then where is the reader? Are we to assume the public fans are just hypnotized by critics? I wonder how many people take their cues (and taste) from book reviews in the New Yorker et al. More than I'd hope probably. Depressing. This was funny and useful though:
"This is a good example of what I call the andelope: a breathless string of simple declarative statements linked by the conjunction 'and'. Like the 'evocative' slide-show and the Consumerland shopping-list, the andelope encourages skim-reading while keeping up the appearance of 'literary' length and complexity. But like the slide-show (and unlike the shopping-list), the andelope often clashes with the subject matter, and the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the methodical meal that is being described."
No one is obligated to like anything because someone else likes it. It doesn't work for you, it's a big whole world out there and this is just one of may subjective representations of it.
On the point about punctuation, you just infer where they should be. It takes some getting used to but once you're in the rhythm and cadence of the style (& era Cormac writes about) you kinda don't notice it and pause at the natural places.
Anyway I like his stuff. Not all of it but plenty of it. One of my more favourable lines from him (Blood Meridian I think): "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage"
Honestly, it's less about the lack of punctuation and more about the apparent lack of cohesion or even relation among the list elements. It sounds like these are just what items occurred to the writer's mind in a sort of ecstatic frenzy (that register he favors). What I'm hoping is that I'm just blind to the intricate relatedness of the images, symbols, word choices, etc... They read like just whatever he thought of at that moment of his febrile brain running along and not to have more intentionality than that. If the listicles were in a poem (even a lengthy one, like Whitman) I might be inclined to do the work of teasing out the relationships. But the enumerations are frequent and endless. That's a lot to ask if there aren't visible markers of genius. Surely there a hermeneuticists among the fandom that can shine a light on the necessity of this prose style as structural supports for the work overall. Otherwise it's just pulp and doesn't mean anything except a vibe. Which, ok, whatever, but that's not much of a selling point. Are we to say that Bach and Taylor Swift are equally artistic just because they can both appeal to different tastes? That sounds like the argument here.
Are we to say that Bach and Taylor Swift are equally artistic just because they can both appeal to different tastes? That sounds like the argument here.
McCarthy has his champions among ordinary readers but he also won many "serious" awards. Which authority could satisfactorily bless his work if not the reading public and not professional critics/professors/writers?
I like McCarthy, but I also understand not liking authors that other readers love. Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall garnered widespread acclaim, and I generally like historical fiction, but I had to give up on it after a few chapters. Sometimes an author doesn't fit with one's tastes. Trying to persuade a reader to feel differently is like trying to persuade someone who loves/hates fish how they should feel about grilled salmon.
