/lit/ - Literature

>>21737220
Nice bait heh so funny

>>21737230
Not bait.

I don't have an opinion on that statement since I'm not familiar with Shakespeare but I've read my fair share of other stuff from a variety of writers of the western Canon and McCarthy is one of my favorites. However I absolutely understand people not liking his style and the people that find him difficult to read at times (Blood Meridian mostly, I think) because of his verbosity and vocabulary he uses and even the way he structures his sentences. There's been a handful of times in my life that I've encountered a piece of art (a painter, a band I wasn't familiar with, etc) and thought 'THIS is it.' Almost as if it's something so great to you (for lack of a better word I guess) that it plugs into a hole in your life that you never even knew was the. McCarthy was that for me with literature. (and Moby Dick) Do you guys know what I mean? An example with music was the first time I ever heard Robert Johnson, and I wasn't even a fan of blues music and didn't know much of it and still don't really listen to it outside of him but for some reason he music just blew me away. I don't want to be melodramatic but I think those moments may be one of the things that have made it feel like being alive may be worth it. Unfortunately they've gotten fewer and further between as I've gotten older. But anyways now I can't remember what this thread was about but thanks for reading. Oh yeah, Cormac McCarthy! Good shit.

Gaddis writes some of the best sentences I've ever read. The Recognitions is a treat for your subvocalization. I have read a couple corncob books, and I remember a few really good sentences.
A single good sentence can make a book for me. There is something so powerful and majestic in the way a dozen or so words can be kabbalisticly arranged to make something so beautiful.

>>21737220
t. Hasn’t read Joyce.

>>21737507
I have actually. It's splitting hairs. McCarthy succeeds in a very sparse barren mode also which is the deal breaker for me.

>>21737220
Sorry I’m the OP forgot my trip and put the wrong picture

>>21737584
Retard.

>>21737220
Bloque votre chemin

>>21737220
Purely considering style:
Shakespeare > Melville > Updike > Faulkner > Joyce > Vonnegut > Pynchon
Would have to go much further down the list to run into McCarthy

Here is a real challenger

>>21737584
Retard

>>21737653
>Having garbage like Vonnegut, Pynchon and Updike over McCarthy
This is what a 19 year's opinion reads like.

>>21737653
The first thing needed to be an All time Great Stylist is an actual, distinct, highly recognizable style. From your list the guys who qualify would be Shakespeare, Joyce and Faulkner (Melville, as great and elegant as he is, cannot be segragated purely on the basis of one-off passages, his style materializes in the reading of the whole book; and what I have read of Updike the same can be said). Among those four, McCarthy would easily rise up to at least no. 2 given his many eccentric writing habits that surprisingly do not come off as gratuitous (to quote DFW).

I do not imagine you could post passages from Vonnegut or Pynchon and have people who already haven't read the book recognize who the writer is. That's my point.

>>21737220
oops wrong pic

>>21737791
>written by a literal homosexual
Just when I feel I am in, they push me back out.

>>21737220
Yeah, but it's a shame about the paragraphs.

>>21737220
What’s his name?

>>21737772
>Melville, as great and elegant as he is, cannot be segragated purely on the basis of one-off passages
Retard, opinion discarded.

>>21737465
Cringe.
>>21737791
Based.

>>21737220
How can you even read this man after he exposed himself with those embarrassing interviews where he goes on and on about The Science™?

>>21737220
did my elderly bro just solve the kennedy assassination in the last couple pages of the passenger?

>>21737584
Fagtard

>>21737713
>>21737772
Why the Pynchon hate? Pynchon has his shortcomings but lack of distinct style is not one of them

>>21738774
he hasn't read pynchon.

>>21738774
His sentences aren't recognizable on their own. You probably mean style as the overall aesthetic of the book.
>>21738783
Teenager

>>21738615
Melville in isolated sentences reads like an overly verbose Victorian novelist.

>>21737647
basé

>>21737220
Post some examples from his works please.

>>21740140
He climbed into the loft and sat at the tower window wrapped in his blanket. Spits of rain on the sill. Summer lightning far out to sea. Like the flare of distant fieldpieces. The patter on the tarp he’d stretched over his bed. He turned up the wick of the lamp at his elbow and took the notebook from its box and opened it. Then he stopped. He sat for a long time. In the end, she had said, there will be nothing that cannot be simulated. And this will be the final abridgment of privilege. This is the world to come. Not some other. The only alternate is the surprise in those antic shapes burned into the concrete.

The ages of men stretching grave to grave. An accounting on a slate. Blood, darkness. The washing of dead children on a board. The stone laminations of the world with their fossil prints unreckonable in form and number. My father’s latterday petroglyphs and the people upon the road naked and howling.

The storm passed and the dark sea lay cold and heavy. In the cool metallic waters the hammered shapes of great fishes. The reflection in the swells of a molten bolide trundling across the firmament like a burning train.

He bent over his grammar in the light of the oil lamp. The straw roof hissing in the bellshaped dark above him and his shadow on the roughtroweled wall. Like those scholars of old in their cold stone rooms toiling at their scrolls. The lenses of their lamps that were made of tortoiseshell boiled and scraped and formed in a press and the fortuitous geographies they cast upon the tower walls of lands unknown alike to men or to their gods.

Finally he leaned and cupped his hand to the glass chimney and blew out the lamp and lay back in the dark. He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.

>>21740146
Absolutely breathtaking God-tier prose. MCCARTHYCHADS… I KNEEL.

What book is this from, btw?

>>21740140
>ah, blood meridian, monsieur? that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.

McCarthy is kinda nice but the best writer of sentences has to master a whole bunch of different styles and literary modes. McCarthy has nowhere near the stylistic diversity of the Bard or the Fart-sniffer.

>>21740338
Not to mention the first half of his career he was basically transcribing Faulkner's style. To be a convincing imitation of Faulkner already puts you in the first class of writers but it won't put you above or place you equal to your master.

>>21740338
That's true for McCarthy as well. Each of his books is written in a different style, but his identity is very strong and that is retained in each of them. He has mastered both the high flown ornate mode and the starched very barren one as well. The Crossing is not written like Blood Meridian, but also not like The Road.

Maybe not Joyce, but his diversity is comparable to how Shakespeare had evolved across his body of work. Let's be honest though, much of the style variation in Ulysses is gimmick-based.

>>21740353
I'm a huge Faulknerfag and I'd be the first to admit McCarthy is a better prose stylist

>>21740353
Neither Child of God nor Suttree are written in Faulkner's style, unless your definition of Faulkner's style is basically anything from the south written in long elaborate sentences. By your metric, Faulkner was basically a Conrad copy and never had an original prose style.

>>21740146
>trying that hard for so long just to give up and end it with "like a burning train" because you're drunk and want to go to bed

>>21740289
The Passenger.

>>21740369
Maybe but he lacks Willie's SOUL and certainly his narrative innovation. What Faulkner did in As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury remains untouched.

>>21740378
There's no question McCarthy was heavily influenced by Faulkner. And he hasn't tried to hide it either.

This review of The Orchard Keeper (his first book) sums it up well

>There are no marathon sentences in these pages, but most of Faulkner's other famous characteristics are present: the wandering pronouns with no visible antecedents; the recondite vocabulary and coined words; the dense prose packed with elaborate figures of speech; the deliberate ambiguity, the hints and withheld information; the confusion in time and place, and the flashbacks that fall to shed much light into the intermittent gloom.

>https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-orchard.html

The elaborateness, biblical register, magnanimity, density, and the tendency to read the gnostic and profound in the lives of simple people is a Faulknerian trait that McCarthy very well inherited.

>>21740413
His first book isn't written like his other books. Not just in style, but not even in content. And it is very clear that you haven't read any of his early works.
>the wandering pronouns with no visible antecedents; the recondite vocabulary and coined words; the dense prose packed with elaborate figures of speech; the deliberate ambiguity, the hints and withheld information; the confusion in time and place, and the flashbacks that fall to shed much light into the intermittent gloom.
You have just described Joyce also. But Faulkner also imitated Joyce, even in his supposed masterpieces like As I lay dying and TSATF.

>The elaborateness, biblical register, magnanimity, density, and the tendency to read the gnostic and profound in the lives of simple people is a Faulknerian trait that McCarthy very well inherited
So he inherited genericisms? All of those can also be found in Melville and Conrad. The problem with both you and the reviewer is that an autho's style is more than just genericisms. Was Faulkner an influence? Sure as hell he was. But is McCarthy's writing style in his early novels an imitation? Sure as hell no. Everything from syntax to diction and even his choice of figures of speech separates him. Those things are much more fundamental in developing your own style. I mean, isn't Faulkner's elaborate figutes of speech, especially his metaphors, just him borrowing from traditional Gothic prose? Darl's sections for example.

Since you have pulled out a review, this is Guy Davenport, the once best essayist in America and an underrated short story writer, on Outer Dark:

>Mr. McCarthy's first novel, "The Orchard Keeper," won the William Faulkner Foundation Award three years ago. This, his second, is even finer. Though it pays its homage to Faulkner's rhetoric and imagery, it is not a Faulknerian novel. It is much leaner, closer in pace and spareness of line to the Gothic masters Gertrud Le Fort and her disciple Isak Dinesen, and lacks Faulkner's sociological dimension. Mr. McCarthy is unashamedly an allegorist. His responsibility as a storyteller includes believing with his characters in the devil, or at least in the absolute destructiveness of evil. As in Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale," the moral symmetry of which is thoroughly Appalachian, you can hear mortality whetting its scythe behind every line.

>The originality of Mr. McCarthy's novel is not in its theme or locale, both of which are impressively ancient. It is his style which compels admiration, a style compounded of Appalachian phrases as plain and as functional as an ax. In elegant counterpoint to this bare-bones English is a second diction taken from that rich store of English which is there in the dictionary to be used by those who can ("his shadow moiled cant," "the tapered spline of the axle"). Surprisingly, so hard-wrought a style is not in the least precious.

>>21740413
>What Faulkner did in As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury remains untouched.
What innovation? Cuckner just copied Joyce and LARPed a bit behind a Shakespearean premise but set in the South.

>>21740413
>>21740554
Blah blah blah blah a whole bunch of bullshit that can be solved by actually taking paragraphs and mapping out clausal and syntactic structure but everyone here is too dumb to do that and just rely on throwing 'authorities' who are none the wiser at each other.

>>21740633
Okay

This one is from Part 3 of The Orchard Keeper (readers of McCarthy's later novels will see the difference):-

>They followed one by one, the stiff winter nettles at the cave door rattling viperously against the legs of their jeans. Inside they struck matches and Warn took a candlestub from a crevice and lit it, the calcined rock taking shape, tonsiled roof and flowing concavity like something gone partly to liquid and frozen back again misshapen and awry, their shadows curling threatfully up the walls among the dried and mounded bat-droppings. They studied the inscriptions etched in the soft and curdcolored stone, hearts and names, archaic dates, crudely erotic hieroglyphs—the bulbed phallus and strange centipedal vulva of small boys’ imaginations.

Now post something by Faulkner that reads close enough to be mistaken as being written by the same writer.

>>21740670
There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and over-sweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house.

>>21740689
Not seeing it.

May I come in?

>>21740689
Part 4:

Rainwater seeped among the porous boards of the outhouse until the windrowed leaves in the cat’s corner were black and lifeless and the cat left through the leaning door to seek new shelter. Pools of black water stood in the path swirling slowly their wrack of straw and weeds, armadillo beetles coiled round as shot and strangely buoyant. She skirted them on wincing feet, bore squeamishly the wet slide of last year’s limp and slime-brown weeds.

Such light as there was to announce the new day filtered thinly through a mizzle of rain and remarked the fluff of her taupe fur curled in a cleft treebole on the south slope of Red Mountain. Hunger drove her out in the late afternoon, cautious, furtive, dusted with wood-rot.

Still the rain, eating at the roads, cutting gullies on the hills till they ran red and livid as open wounds. The creek came up into the fields, a river of mud questing among the honeysuckles. Fenceposts like the soldiers of Pharaoh marched from sight into the flooded draws.

In Saunders’ field a shallow marsh, calm and tractable beneath the dimpling rain. And yet rain. What low place did not hold water? At the little end of McCall’s pond water fell thunderously into the sinkhole that drained it. Along Little River the flats stood weed-deep in livercolored water flecked with thatches of small driftwood and foam that coiled and spun near imperceptibly, or rocked with the wind-riffles passing under them. By day flocks of rails gathered. A pair of bitterns stalked with gimlet eyes the fertile shallows. At night the tidelands rang with peepers, with frogs gruffly choral. Great scaly gars from the river invaded the flats, fierce and primitive of aspect, long beaks full of teeth, ancient fishes survived unchanged from mesozoic fens, their yellowed boneless skeletons graced the cracked clay-beds later in the season where the water left them to what querulous harridans, fishcrow or buzzard, might come to glean their frames, the smelly marvel of small boys.

>>21740704
No. Don't ask again.

>>21740720
Better than Cuckner

>Invents lolis and makes generations of blue haired harpies sympathize with a rapist with a single sentence

Yea u mirin

>>21740670
>>21740689
>>21740709
That was my point. I don't see much syntactical similarities in the passages, and I have read enough of Absalom, Absalom! to know that the book is absolutely jampacked with subordinate clauses which are almost entirely missing in McCarthy, even in the early novels. Besides that, look at the figures of speech. McCarthy's are almost always visual and turned towards the landscape and show a hard preference for similes, meanwhile Faulkner clearly prefers metaphors and a more abstract association:

Dim coffin-smelling - gloom? Sweet and over-sweet?
Savage and quiet - Sun?
She resembled a - Crucified Child?
Voice rising and vanishing like a stream
Voice haunted by a ghost
Etc.

They do share affinities though. All three passages are word drunk, somewhat Gothic (Faulkner's are much more Gothic) and you can definitely run into occasional phrases and words that are inherited from their southern speech. But McCarthy's profundity is a function of his language, not the other way around, and it is almost exclusively reserved for his landscapes and rarely for his people. None of McCarthy's novels can be described as Character dramas, but that's the shortest description one can give a Faulkner novel.

>>21737220
Who?

>>21740368
Which of his books are the ornately written ones and which ones are the barren ones? I’m new Mccarthy and I’d also like to know where to start.

>>21741027
Ornate ones:-
The Orchard Keeper
Outer Dark
Suttree
Blood Meridian

Sparse ones:-
Child of God
The Border trilogy
The Passenger

Really Sparse one:-
The Road

Screenplay tier:-
No country for Old men

>>21741029
Thanks man.

>>21737220
He just stole elements from movies for his stories, since he only consumes non fiction (and no fiction) now. That’s why The Road is about Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with the group of militarised cannibals, and post apocalyptic movies.

>>21740401
Damn I’m hyped to read this now.

>>21740689
this rhymes when you read it out loud with a certain meter. i don't like it.

>>21741442
Why?

>>21737341
> Unfortunately they've gotten fewer and further between as I've gotten older
You've almost figured out the real truth, and not the elaborate rationalization you're focused on.

It's not that McCarthy and Robert Johnson are as mind blowing as you experienced, its that being young heightens your emotional experiences because experience in general is novel to you.

>>21741029
I don’t remember Child of God being as sparse as the Border trilogy

>>21741527
It's quite sparse relative to his earlier novels. But yes, not as much as The Border trilogy. Though The Crossing has the longest sentences among the 4 books.

>>21737465
>kabbalistically arranged
elaborate. I don't think you can, but I'll give you a shot. Honestly, no one I've heard mention The Recognitions has talked about the glaringly obvious aspect of the book that runs through every page yet remains discreetly shuffled in the pack. I can see why it might be missed, one must be exposed *to it*, to recognize it, one of those brilliant facets of his work. I would say the early chapters, specifically those that exist before Wyatt loses his name, just before those parties, certainly before the one containing that painting "L'Ame d'un Chantier", there is a certain deliberacy Gaddis portrays. He is not writing his words in the fashion of a typist, or a caricaturist, nor humourist, nor modernist, but rather something more fascinating; it seems to me he is binding the art of painting to the art of writing wholly. Building up the colors, scraping them across the well-prepared surface, and laying foundations of grisaille that come out as flesh tones in the figures that are later developed. He is *painting* that book, at least until he cannot sustain the effect and is forced to retreat into his natural dialogue. It is a beautiful treasure he forms for these short periods. Sure, one can marvel at the maximalist nature of the plot and the threads that tie the characters, bind them to their themes, but the shape of the thing; it is not simply a *style* which inhabits that page, for form or figure does not reflect nor accomodate the design. There is no word for what he for some few days perhaps achieved. It is no genre, it is no style, to call it a style is to lower it.

This speaks nothing to the theme that haunts the page, that blazes out at one, but it is (as an aside) an example of his creativity and cleverness in binding two arts into one, albeit quite temporarily.

>>21741029
I'd put Outer Dark on the less ornate side of the ornate ones or maybe even in between ornate and sparse but leaning towards ornate. I'd like to have more books from him in the really sparse category like the Road.

The guy just took Conrad's writing style and added some Texan to it, I like it.

>>21741644
Fucking ridiculous; Conrad's forte was an ingenious clarity, exactly the opposite of what this pseud is doing.

>>21737220
But Shakespeare wrote in verse, not sentences.

>>21741644
>>21741718
You are both retarded.

>>21741644
If Conrad wrote with polysyndeton and zero romanticism and really loved landscapes perhaps...

Faulkner is more indebted to Conrad than McCarthy is.

>>21741555
Shut up retard.