RIP Cormac McCarthy

[Iota]

I've only read two McCarthy novels, Suttree and The Road.

I read Suttree over a decade ago and admired it rather than loved it, but admired it in a good way. The language conjured up atmosphere and setting distinctively, often with laser-like focus on minutiae, which meant visits to arcane regions of the dictionary, sometimes to great effect, sometimes slightly wearingly so. But no doubting his facility with words and his striking gift as a writer.

I did try and pick it up again a while ago and found I no longer had the desire to wade through the ornate language and gave up a short way in. The dialogue though I still found very arresting, and have absolutely no problem with the absence of speech marks as some here do. It not only worked, with characters emerging very vividly, but added sth too I think.

The Road I liked, I thought it had a quiet kind of poetry about it. Much less dense prose too. Though again I never quite felt the sense of involvement that I get when I love a book.

[vers la flamme]

Well yes, my criticism is trivial; its a very minor aspect of the book, but I still think its worth commenting on, because hes made a peculiar stylistic choice and I dont think it adds anything worthwhile to the story.

If (for instance) he had done something like what Russell Hoban did in Riddley Walker (another postapocalyptic novel), where the damaged language reflects the shattered world of the novel, I could understand and applaud that. But he doesnt do that.

McCarthy's personal style is just an idiosyncratic thing. It has nothing to do with the postapocalyptic subject matter of the book. He omits these apostrophes in a number of his books. Applaud it or not, it's there, and as has been admitted, it is a minor aspect in any case that ought not to detract from the reading experience, unless one is a real stickler for perfect grammar. Question: would you fault a poet, like e. e. cummings for their example, for unorthodox style as well?

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

I've only read two McCarthy novels, Suttree and The Road.

I read Suttree over a decade ago and admired it rather than loved it, but admired it in a good way. The language conjured up atmosphere and setting distinctively, often with laser-like focus on minutiae, which meant visits to arcane regions of the dictionary, sometimes to great effect, sometimes slightly wearingly so. But no doubting his facility with words and his striking gift as a writer.

I do want to give Suttree another shot. The language struck me as unnecessarily ornate, but maybe I'll get used to it.

I don't have a problem with absence of speech marks, either. As long as it's done in an intelligible fashion, it shouldn't be a problem.

Question: would you fault a poet, like e. e. cummings for their example, for unorthodox style as well?

Paradoxically, my problem with McCarthy's apostrophobia is that it doesn't go far enough. It looks like a random tic, or bad editing, rather than an element of style. Note for instance that BWV 1080 above didn't even notice the lack of apostrophes in my previous post - it left no impression. In the case of ee cummings or various other experimental writers, they use their style(s) in a more comprehensive and thorough way.

[vers la flamme]

I do want to give Suttree another shot. The language struck me as unnecessarily ornate, but maybe I'll get used to it.

I don't have a problem with absence of speech marks, either. As long as it's done in an intelligible fashion, it shouldn't be a problem.

Paradoxically, my problem with McCarthy's apostrophobia is that it doesn't go far enough. It looks like a random tic, or bad editing, rather than an element of style. Note for instance that BWV 1080 above didn't even notice the lack of apostrophes in my previous post - it left no impression. In the case of ee cummings or various other experimental writers, they use their style(s) in a more comprehensive and thorough way.

I don't think McCarthy's omission of apostrophes in words like "dont" or "wont" has any kind of experimental or revolutionary intent. It's just an idiosyncrasy among many of his personal style. Taking issue with it for not taking it "far enough" seems to be missing the point.

Edit: As I reread this post and the past few in this page, I realize how silly it is, if not flat out disrespectful, to be engaging in a debate about apostrophes in a memorial thread to a great writer. So this is the last I will say on the matter.

[San Antone]

As I reread this post and the past few in this page, I realize how silly it is, if not flat out disrespectful, to be engaging in a debate about apostrophes in a memorial thread to a great writer. So this is the last I will say on the matter.

My feeling exactly. Instead of a place where we could have expressed our sadness over the loss of a favorite writer - we read instead carping about trivialities and a list of all the reasons why some never liked his books.

 

[Mandryka]

I've read a few of his novels and found myself pretty disturbed at the level of violence. It is not clear to me what overall "theme" infuses his fiction, except that the heart of the United States is senseless brutality.

You'd better not read the Iliad then.

Well I was speaking in jest, but I've started reading Blood Meridian and I've come across this description of a battle -- worthy of Homer IMO. Really impressive!

The company was now come to a halt and the first shots were fired and the gray riflesmoke rolled through the dust as the lancers breached their ranks. The kid's horse sank beneath him with a long pneumatic sigh. He had already fired his rifle and now he sat on the ground and fumbled with his shotpouch. A man near him sat with an arrow hanging out of his neck. He was bent slightly as if in prayer. The kid would have reached for the bloody hoop-iron point but then he saw that the man wore another arrow in his breast to the fletching and he was dead. Everywhere there were horses down and men scrambling and he saw a man who sat charging his rifle while blood ran from his ears and he saw men with their revolvers disassembled trying to fit the spare loaded cylinders they carried and he saw men kneeling who tilted and clasped their shadows on the ground and he saw men lanced and caught up by the hair and scalped standing and he saw the horses of war trample down the fallen and a little whitefaced pony with one clouded eye leaned out of the murk and snapped at him like a dog and was gone. Among the wounded some seemed dumb and without understanding and some were pale through the masks of dust and some had fouled themselves or tottered brokenly onto the spears of the savages. Now driving in a wild frieze of headlong horses with eyes walled and teeth cropped and naked riders with clusters of arrows clenched in their jaws and their shields winking in the dust and up the far side of the ruined ranks in a piping of boneflutes and dropping down off the sides of their mounts with one heel hung in the withers strap and their short bows flexing beneath the outstretched necks of the ponies until they had circled the company and cut their ranks in two and then rising up again like funhouse figures, some with nightmare faces painted on their breasts, riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bodies, ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slathered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows. And now the horses of the dead came pounding out of the smoke and dust and circled with flapping leather and wild manes and eyes whited with fear like the eyes of the blind and some were feathered with arrows and some lanced through and stumbling and vomiting blood as they wheeled across the killing ground and clattered from sight again. Dust stanched the wet and naked heads of the scalped who with the fringe of hair below their wounds and tonsured to the bone now lay like maimed and naked monks in the bloodslaked dust and everywhere the dying groaned and gibbered and horses lay screaming.

[vers la flamme]

The book is riddled with passages like that, like to the point you're going to get sick of them. But it's an amazing book and well worth a read or two (I didn't like it the first time, loved it the second).

[Mandryka]

The book is riddled with passages like that, like to the point you're going to get sick of them.

Exactly like The Iliad. And in the Iliad, possibly in Blood Meridian too, there's the question: what's the author trying to achieve with this accumulation of gore?

Anyway, it's an impressive book -  I know nothing about the context, absolutely nothing, and it's still impressive.

[vers la flamme]

Exactly like The Iliad. And in the Iliad, possibly in Blood Meridian too, there's the question: what's the author trying to achieve with this accumulation of gore?

Anyway, it's an impressive book -  I know nothing about the context, absolutely nothing, and it's still impressive.

Now you're making me want to read Homer.

[Mandryka]

Now you're making me want to read Homer.

Lots of stuff like this

There—Pirithous' son the rugged Polypoetes
skewered Damasus, pierced his bronze-sided helmet.
None of the bronze plate could hold it, boring through
the metal and skull the brazen spearpoint pounded,
Damasus' brains splattered all inside his casque—
Polypoetes beat him down despite the Trojan's rage,
then Pylon and Ormenus, killed and stripped them both.
And the tested veteran Leonteus speared Hippomachus,
gouged Antimachus' offspring down across the belt,
then drawing his long sharp sword from its sheath
he rushed the front and took Antiphates first
with a quick thrust, stabbing at close range—
he slammed on his back, sprawled along the ground.
Then Menon, Orestes, Iamenus—Leonteus killed the lot,
crowding corpse on corpse on the earth that rears us all.

Achilles speared him square in the back where his war-belt clasped,
golden buckles clinching both halves of his breastplate
straight on through went the point and out the navel,
down on his knees he dropped
screaming shrill as the world went black before him
clutched his bowels to his body, hunched and sank

But Meriones caught him in full retreat, hed let fly
with a bronze-tipped arrow, hitting his right buttock
up under the pelvic bone so the lance pierced the bladder.
He sank on the spot, hunched in his dear companion's arms,
gasping out his life as he writhed along the ground
like an earthworm stretched out in death, blood pooling,
soaking the earth dark red. . .

[Spotted Horses]

Lots of stuff like this

There—Pirithous' son the rugged Polypoetes
skewered Damasus, pierced his bronze-sided helmet.
None of the bronze plate could hold it, boring through
the metal and skull the brazen spearpoint pounded,
Damasus' brains splattered all inside his casque—
Polypoetes beat him down despite the Trojan's rage,
then Pylon and Ormenus, killed and stripped them both.
And the tested veteran Leonteus speared Hippomachus,
gouged Antimachus' offspring down across the belt,
then drawing his long sharp sword from its sheath
he rushed the front and took Antiphates first
with a quick thrust, stabbing at close range—
he slammed on his back, sprawled along the ground.
Then Menon, Orestes, Iamenus—Leonteus killed the lot,
crowding corpse on corpse on the earth that rears us all.

Achilles speared him square in the back where his war-belt clasped,
golden buckles clinching both halves of his breastplate
straight on through went the point and out the navel,
down on his knees he dropped
screaming shrill as the world went black before him
clutched his bowels to his body, hunched and sank

But Meriones caught him in full retreat, hed let fly
with a bronze-tipped arrow, hitting his right buttock
up under the pelvic bone so the lance pierced the bladder.
He sank on the spot, hunched in his dear companion's arms,
gasping out his life as he writhed along the ground
like an earthworm stretched out in death, blood pooling,
soaking the earth dark red. . .

How many people die, these days "clutching his bowels to his body?" More likely in a hospital bed connected to a web of tubes, the last thing you hear is the faint beeping of an alert on some sort of medical monitoring equipment. Maybe the closest equivalent having your ribs broken by some idiot performing CPR, because you neglected to sign a DNR order.

Anyway, I remember reading passages like that. I guess the thing that motivated me to read (and re-read) the Illiad was to appreciate the worldview of people who lived thousands of years ago, guided by a completely different understanding of the world. Among other things, they did not shirk the visceral aspects of human anatomy. I remember a passage where Odysseus sneaks into the enemy camp and slaughters soldiers as they sleep, and it was depicted as heroic, rather than cowardly, as it might be in our current style of glorifying violence.

The Iliad is fascinating and mysterious in many ways. I rememeber reading commentary where there is some evidence of factual accuracy, in that the combatants are depicted using bronze weapons, outdated when the epics were apparently written down, although other passages refer to iron weapons, which hadn't been invented at then presumed time of the Trojan War.

(I'm a Lattimore guy.)

[San Antone]

Anyway, I remember reading passages like that. I guess the thing that motivated me to read (and re-read) the Illiad was to appreciate the worldview of people who lived thousands of years ago, guided by a completely different understanding of the world. Among other things, they did not shirk the visceral aspects of human anatomy. I remember a passage where Odysseus sneaks into the enemy camp and slaughters soldiers as they sleep, and it was depicted as heroic, rather than cowardly, as it might be in our current style of glorifying violence.

I have four translations, Butler, Fagles, Fitzgerald and Lattimore.  I prefer Fagles.

We recently saw an 90 minute one-man show based on the Iliad, An Iliad, told from the stand point of "The Poet." The play is made up of a monologue, including some Iliad quotes, about war in general and man's propensity for violence throughout history.

We enjoyed it, and the actor did an amazing job with the text.

[Karl Henning]

Why Do We Accept Cormac McCarthy's Self-Mythology?

[San Antone]

Why Do We Accept Cormac McCarthy's Self-Mythology?

I almost did not read the article you linked.  From the title I thought it might be a hit piece (I have no tolerance for those who take pot shots at McCarthy).  But I am glad I went ahead and took a stab at it. 

He has been a long time favorite author of mine, and I've ignored much about his biography, taking pleasure in the books - which has been enough.

The article was nicely done, and provided me with at least one quote which I found worth the entire piece: "A fuller narrative still gives us someone who worked hard, ignoring many of the personal and interpersonal costs of his radical commitment; someone who eventually got what he deserved to earn, and then some; someone whose money and fame did not appear to change him; someone who kept writing great novels on a $20 typewriter."

[Karl Henning]

I almost did not read the article you linked.  From the title I thought it might be a hit piece (I have no tolerance for those who take pot shots at McCarthy).  But I am glad I went ahead and took a stab at it. 

He has been a long time favorite author of mine, and I've ignored much about his biography, taking pleasure in the books - which has been enough.

The article was nicely done, and provided me with at least one quote which I found worth the entire piece: "A fuller narrative still gives us someone who worked hard, ignoring many of the personal and interpersonal costs of his radical commitment; someone who eventually got what he deserved to earn, and then some; someone whose money and fame did not appear to change him; someone who kept writing great novels on a $20 typewriter."

A good article, I agree. For me, especially informative. I understand the misdoubt whether it might be a hit piece.

[Spotted Horses]

someone who kept writing great novels on a $20 typewriter.

Maybe I'm the only one who remembers it, but Russell Baker, The New York Times Columnist (and author of a wonderful autobiography, Growing Up) wrote a column in which is said he was going to switch from his typewriter to a word processor. In mid paragraph the style abruptly switch from his usually succinct, elegant prose, to grotesquely discursive, rambling run-on sentences. Probably good that McCarthy stuck with his typewriter. I read that Joyce Carol Oats still writes novels in longhand.

[Mandryka]

Having just finished Blood Meridian, I'll post something here.

The question I have is whether it is a story book which keeps the reader hooked because of the language style and the gruesomeness. Or whether there is more to it than that. It's clear that it has pretentions to be more than that, but at the moment I can't make head nor tail of it.


That being said,   something the Judge says at the end seems to me to maybe contain a bit of real insight

That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man's life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That's the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail? To whom is he talking, man? Cant you see him?

The man was indeed muttering to himself and peering bale-fully about the room wherein it seemed there was no friend to him.

 

Here's something that happens towards the end -- is it just pretentious? The "he" is the person referred to elsewhere as "the kid", but who is, I think, now mature.

He went down the walkboard toward the jakes. He stood outside listening to the voices fading away and he looked again at the silent tracks of the stars where they died over the darkened hills. Then he opened the rough board door of the jakes and stepped in.

The judge was seated upon the closet. He was naked and he rose up smiling and gathered him in his arms against his immense and terrible flesh and shot the wooden barlatch home behind him. . . . n the mudded dogyard behind the premises two men went down the boards toward the jakes. A third man was standing there urinating into the mud.

Is someone in there? the first man said.

The man who was relieving himself did not look up. I wouldnt go in there if I was you, he said.

Is there somebody in there?

I wouldnt go in.

He hitched himself up and buttoned his trousers and stepped past them and went up the walk toward the lights. The first man watched him go and then opened the door of the jakes.

Good God almighty, he said.

What is it?

He didnt answer. He stepped past the other and went back up the walk. The other man stood looking after him. Then he opened the door and looked in. . . .

[BWV 1080]

Having just finished Blood Meridian, I'll post something here.

The question I have is whether it is a story book which keeps the reader hooked because of the language style and the gruesomeness. Or whether there is more to it than that. It's clear that it has pretentions to be more than that, but at the moment I can't make head nor tail of it.

Horror is a legit theme in and of itself. If I would criticize Blood Meridian on anything, it would be the Judge serving as a vehicle for McCarthy's philosophical musings.  In reality, people who commit these acts are just boring psychopaths, but its a bad stereotype in movies and novels to make them something more

[Mandryka]

Well it's not like the Judge is pnly a mouthpiece for McCormac's "philosophy" - he has a structural role to play in the narrative. It looks like a Bildungsroman, and the Judge is a key figure in the Kid's development - and he does develop, but I'm not sure I can say how.

I'm 40% through All The Pretty Horses now - not impressed! But I'll stay with it a bit longer to see what happens in prison.

[BWV 1080]

Well it's not like the Judge is pnly a mouthpiece for McCormac's "philosophy" - he has a structural role to play in the narrative. It looks like a Bildungsroman, and the Judge is a key figure in the Kid's development - and he does develop, but I'm not sure I can say how.

I'm 40% through All The Pretty Horses now - not impressed! But I'll stay with it a bit longer to see what happens in prison.

Its been a while since I read the book, but I recall Judge Holden as the main protagonist with The Kid only providing a view for the reader.  McCarthy gravitates to these 'evil archetype' characters, like the Judge or Chigurh in No Country for Old Men.

This appears to be the sole historical source material for Judge Holden:

The second in command, now left in charge of the camp, was a man of gigantic size called "Judge" Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler blooded villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas; and before we left Fronteras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged him with the crime.

Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or the Guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance and out-waltz any poblana of the ball. He was "plum center" with a rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in geology and mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward.

Not but that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone else where he had the advantage in strength, skill, and weapons. But where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first sight and he knew it, yet nothing could be more gentle and kind than his deportment towards me: He would often seek conversation with me and speak of Massachusetts and to my astonishment I found he knew more about Boston than I did. [sic][5]