McCarthy learned all the wrong lessons from Faulkner, throwing out quotation marks, apostrophes, and commas as a declaration of literary intent rather than because his characters talk that way. So many critics have praised Faulkner’s style, but it’s hard to tell when they’re praising the good things about his style, and when they’re praising him merely for being weird. The problem with Faulkner’s little-s style isn’t that it’s bad in Faulkner’s work the problem is that it leads to Cormac McCarthy. In McCarthy’s case it’s just part of a rebellion against grammar, whose transparent purpose is to keep his books from being shelved together with Louis L’Amour. In Faulkner’s case he seems to have decided to lexicalize certain contractions but not others, to avoid deliberately-ordered sentence structures such as this one, and to avoid all speech tags but “said”. Both make unusual choices about apostrophes, speech tags, and clause-joining. Both of them have a flashy big-S Style, and a precious little-s style.īy little-s style I mean the way they construct sentences, supposing someone told them what each sentence had to say and gave them a bag of words they could use. Let me start with the style, as that’s the most divisive thing about both men’s writing, but in different ways. Both have a unique style that combines startling poetic passages with disregard for whether the reader can tell what’s going on. I’d have appreciated it better if I’d known what was going to happen (and, often, what was happening).Ĭormac McCarthy’s border trilogy invites obvious comparison with Faulkner’s work: Both are written by country folk about country folk, are full of details of rural life, and focus at least as much on their characters’ psychology as on action sequences. There are “spoilers” in here, but this isn’t the kind of story that relies on plot twists to keep you reading. I wasn’t exactly disappointed: It does what famous 20th-century literary novels do, which is combine insight into characters with stylistic innovations.

The revolution will… on Modernist Manifestos & WW1…Īs I Lay Dying is one of the most-famous novels in American literature. Suspendedreason on Information Theory and Wr…Īdhi Anugroho on The revolution will be inscrib… Writing (and composing): Mahler, Beethoven, Faulkner, House of Dawn, & the Wundt curveįollow A Writing Guide on Categories.George Steiner and post-modern dialectic as improv.The revolution will be inscribed in cuneiform.

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