/lit/ - Literature

style is substance

>>22089956
substance is style

>>22089948
nig over ger

*scalps you*

*spits* Cormac's style *spits* is a gimmick of not using punctuation *spits and it dries almost instantly* to the point where it is detrimental to the work *spits*

>>22090035
does he not? in some other thread some anon also said that Cormac spells words any way he likes
I have read only a translation where both spelling and punctuation were on point

Style is 50-70% of what makes a good work, is every artistic domain

>>22089948
Ok

>>22089948
>Glanton spat there be a bush of nigger babies yonder he said like a steel mill in the cold Arizona july

>>22089948
it's too long for a short read that is carried by good writing

>>22089948
Style is nearly everything. What happens in Tristram Shandy? Not a lot, but the way it is is told makes it fantastic. This is why I believe Dickens is a true master. His stories can be rightly criticized as implausible, erring to the maudlin, not neatly orchestrated etc but the telling of them is frequently hilarious and always evocative and for this I am always glad to be reading him.

>>22090039

In a all the books I've read that hes written, he doesnt use speech marks. He avoids commas, semicolons and colons too.

In blood meridian the style is to imitate the king james bible which is arguablely the most influential work in modern English. Maybe the translator didnt bother with the style because the reference would be lost on non english readers.

Honestly couldn't say if earlier work used more conventional punctuation.

>>22090260
>The Kid spat and he took in the smell of creosote that lingered after rain and he heard the howling of jackals and he saw a nigger squatting naked by the side of the road and its eyes were murky like some distant nebula whose secrets only it was privy to and whose omens held the fates of men unknown

>op gives us neither style nor substance
What did he mean by this?

why is ' ' read a book ' ' and ' ' brc ' ' such a hot thing for women ?

>>22090759
blue roman cancel?

>>22089956

>>22089948
And

>>22090533
>its eyes were murky like some distant nebula whose secrets only it was privy to and whose omens held the fates of men unknown
This ended up being my biggest gripe with BM. The vague "bro it's beyond comprehension" things he seems to just sprinkle at the end of sentences drive me crazy. It has some of the best landscape prose you'll ever read, hands down, especially in regards to the weather. But the unknowable unknown throwaway phrases never held any weight for me. They didn't feel amateur, even. They just added nothing.

>>22091356
They add a lot if you are on the wavelength. It's in the analogical similes that McCarthy has hidden most of what he is doing. Otherwise it'd only be a straightforward book about scalpers and desert.

Blood Meridian? More like Bowel Movement

>>22091458
lmao

>>22089948
>forgot punctuation
>doesn't even have quotation marks
who the hell let this get published anyway

Reddit, the author

>>22092196
>>22092264
Retards

>>22090035
filtered lol

>The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down.
*lowers fedora*
>There is no God and we are his prophets.
*unsheathes katana*
>It makes no difference what men think of war. War endures. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.
*teleports behind you*
>Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
*exhales sharply*
>Men of God and men of war have strange affinities.
*slices you in two with a single stroke*
>This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.
*leaves a single rose on your corpse*
>Nothing personel, The Kid

>>22092392
Why are pseuds like this anon always steaming about this book

>>22091356
You're retarded

>Blood Meridian
Not even McCarthy's best work

>>22092396
Because it absolutely is too funny that this vestige of late 00's fedoralord autism has survived without being universally judged cringe.

>>22092405
Published in 85 tho

>>22089948
every page of Blood Meridian is cream pied with substance. There's so much hot sticky substance dripping off every page that when you come to a seemingly meaningless chapter like the one with the women bathing the retard you think that it must have meaning because everything else so clearly did.

>>22092405
Only fedora tipping edgy retards judge media without reading/engaging with it. Rope yourself.

>>22091356
I am curious what your favourite type of literature is in that case

>>22092405
t. filtered by literary irony

>>22092400
>And they are dancing, the board floor slamming under the platform shoes and the deejay grinning hideously over his begreebled console. Towering over them all is Goofy and he is dressed to the nines dancing, his giant feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and sequinned, like an enormous roll of Lycra. He never sleeps, he says. He says disco’ll never die. He bows to the ladies and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, Goofy. He swings his gloved hands and the ashen hills of his knuckles pass palely under the disco ball and he does the twist and takes possession of the dance floor and he mashed potatoes and makes a pass, two passes, bumping and hustling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that disco will never die. He dances in the strobing lights and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, Goofy. He is dancing, dancing. He says that disco will never die.

>>22090469


How does it imitate the King James Bible? I don’t see it.

>>22092428
Yet an expression of the very same ethos. Edgelordism has always existed. In the 00's, with the advent of the internet, it was brought into the open, and it was collectively experienced that it was cringe. This did much to lessen it, yet it persists, among other things in the fandom of Blood Meridian.

>>22092562
I have read it. It was a terrible slog of thesaurus-humping edgelordery. It had it's wonderful passages to be sure, the one with itinerant carnival of calamity beyond reckoning was powerful prose, but those peaks of brilliance are completely overshadowed by the relentless edgyness.

>>22093276
>I-i-i-it's ironic bro!
I don't think Cormac McCarthy is using the figure of the Judge to pull the reader's legs, but I can readily accept an ironic reading, as it turns the entire book into a joke at the expense of every reader who takes it seriously (99.99%), which I find to be a delightful thought.

>The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

>>22094775
>The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

>>22093848
NTA but he does things like polysyndeton and uses cataclysmic language that is very fire and brimstone. He has characters howling and gnashing their teeth and swearing to the heavens.

>>22093874
for anyone who doesn't frequent BM threads, this anon is an ESL and is too egotistical to admit that Mccarthy's prose filtered him

>>22093279
Billions must vibe.

>>22092392
>War is the ultimate game
>War is god

>>22093279
so pissed this is not from a pynchon novel

>>22093874
There is no way you read the book and thought it was edgelordism. You may just be retarded at this point. It's literally history you fucking retard.

>>22095078
Pynchon sucks

>>22095297
gravity's rainbow greatest novel of the 20th century deal with it

>>22095330
Lol

>>22089948
>he
>he
>he
>they
>they
>he
>they
>he
>he
>they
>he
>they
>they
>they
>he
>he
NIGGA WOULD IT KILL YOU TO USE NAMES?????????????????????

>>22089948
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.

>>22090469
>>22093848
The Bible actually uses a lot of punctuation, and is written rather simply. The Bible's stylistic influence on BM is in the polysyndeton (not not quite the same however) and the voice of the narrator. The Narrator has a heaviness in voice and diction that remembers the KJV.

THIS IS NOW AN ALL THE PRETTY HORSES THREAD.
>The mare has an importance.

>>22089948
>>22091356
Yea exactly, I don't mind style-centric writing but McCarthy's style hinges on an overwhelming pretention towards a certain depth of philosophical profundity. Maybe I just feel this way because of him being a "le science" type, or because of his comments about other writers, or because I have a double standard for him vs what I would apply to, say, Melville or Faulkner, i.e. attributing more authenticity to those authors just because they're older. I wish I could compartmentalize it and enjoy the thematic stuff as just so much set decoration, but for whatever reason (again, perhaps just due to being aware of his personality), I can't seem to get myself to suspend disbelief to that extent.

>>22095917
Dude. He’s a cheap knock off of German idealism reacting to Buddhism. It’s pure ontological argument about fate and tragedy.

It isn’t scientism at all. It is the endless waste of unchosen action which only rarely coincides with happenstance.

The style is largely a by blow of the ontology. Suttree as juvenalia is just southern gothic with an occasional intruding awareness of the mind being a lie.

>>22095946
I didn’t say he espoused scientism in his writings, just that he seems to be enamored with using science as a cultural signifier in his public self-presentation. That’s why I mentioned it as something that might unfairly bias me against him, precisely because it’s not necessarily integral to his work.

>The style is largely a by blow of the ontology

Really? In what way do those ideas require the breathless, doom-laden prophesying tone that McCarthy affects constantly? It just comes across as hopelessly campy, which can be ok if the author doesn’t take himself too seriously, but as far as I can tell he is writing this stuff actually expecting the reader to be bowled over by his generic pessimism.

>>22096060
The retard literally just sifted through the last Suttree thread and tried to force shit into his post he saw other people comment. He has no fucking idea what he is talking about.

>>22095946
You are a fucking phony who has no idea about any of those terms. Fuck off from here retard.

>>22096103
If I'm the retard you're referring to, I didn't post in that thread, I mostly got the McCarthy arguments out of my system a while ago, I only posted here because I wanted to boost an assessment that aligns closely with my own.

>>22096060
Are you sure you really understand the point he is getting across? Seems to me that you are bothered by the philosophy that seems to be there but is inaccessible to you. Your attribution to it as a workable alternative is only when it's not serious, which seems to imply an anti-intellectual viewpoint. That anything that strives for profundity is just campy or non-serious and must be treated so.

Secondly, you seem to draw a line between science and philosophy. I don't see why McCarthy can be interested in Science and not take dialectic seriously. Have you read Stella Maris? That puts across his vision much better than your projection of him as a writer. It's not an absurd position at all once you go through that one.
>In what way do those ideas require the breathless, doom-laden prophesying tone that McCarthy affects constantly?
Where is the doom laden prophesing? I see some people mention this constantly yet the tone of the prose for the most part is wondrous and wondrously detached.

>>22096109
You didn't post in the thread because that's where you copied all the shit from. By the other anon who clearly knew what he was talking about. Don't pretend as if you have any idea you are talking about. You are just saying shit to give some legitimacy to your retarded criticism.
>I mostly got the McCarthy arguments out of my system a while ago
Where? Link the thread. You are stringing together words from effortposts. I will be extremely surprised if you have read even one of his works.

>>22095946
So much hot air here. Back up even one of those claims with evidence from book proper. I swear these retards are trying to affect believable criticism in the most retarded way possible.

>>22093874
lol retard