Cormac McCarthy's Style - Commentary on MFAs Writing the Future

 This will be a long read, one that will be broken over a string of posts. If you are not interested in writing fiction, or my navel-gazing meditations on my own writing, feel to move on. Here I am thinking out loud and keeping notes for myself and offering ideas for others. That my "Love Stinks" has received rather negative views has been a bit of a shock. Working through this shock, the material coming out when McCarthy and Milan Kundera died, impelled this run of writing. It will go further, and wider, with On The Novel: Thank You, Milan Kundera.

Vulnerable is not what comes to mind when I recollect my reading of Cormac McCarthy's novels. No quotation marks comes to mind first, then his refusal to translate Spanish. It makes sense to me if read for a bit - once I got into its groove. Getting in that groove happened for me when I read it out loud - not something I really like doing, never having liked the sound of my own voice - and finding there is some oral about his writing style. It is as if we are overhearing a story being told. Being overhead means there are no quotation marks (Do we hear quotations? No, we read them. When we overhear someone speaking in a foreign language, we are not provided with a translation.)

But Cormac McCarthy & the Vulnerable Style: Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) makes an interesting argument for McCarthy's vulnerability. It is a detailed argument deserving attention.

The problem stated:

Along with violence and a lack of women, McCarthy’s prose also tends to be the serial complaint about his books. Overwrought, it gets called. Ridiculous. Tortured. Strangely, for a writer so lauded for his sentences, the sentences themselves—taken out and shown to others—often lose their allure. They might ravish on the page, but transcribe the paragraph and give it to someone who’s never read his books and often they’ll say anything between “I don’t get it” and “This is terrible.” Typically, this too appeared on social media: widespread mockery of some of the most arresting passages in contemporary American literature.

This contention has always haunted McCarthy’s work. While other novelists with long careers, extensive bodies of work, and extraordinary depth (Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Louise Erdrich, Denis Johnson, Marilynne Robinson, Leslie Marmon Silko)—novelists whose prose, atop their overall genius, is nonetheless singled out for its texture, its poetic invention—there is rarely anything to quibble over in their sentences, even when photographed or otherwise excerpted. It’s always evidently good writing.

I continue reading Roberto Bolano's The Spirit of Science Fiction: A Novel. The following, I think, applies to this novel. I find it exceedingly difficult to excerpt parts to write about here.

McCarthy’s language does not fit in a frame. In his novels, the unit is not the sentence. It’s not even the paragraph. The novel, for McCarthy, is what the novel is made of. This places him in a different category of stylists—with David Markson, say, and Thomas Bernhard. Clarice Lispector. José Saramago. Even Samuel Beckett. While these writers wield exquisite control over their sentences, the sentences serve their novels in a way many other writers’ do not—which consequently makes it difficult to clip sentences free and use them as digital currency. Their skill is not recognizable at a glance.

Pages from these novels, in a phrase, do not photograph well. This is the first major aspect of McCarthy’s style.

Of the writers mentioned above, I have read one of Beckett's novels and three Saramago's. I can see the idea better in Saramago, who can easily write long and complex and lively paragraphs of great length. Here again, it makes sense when one loses themselves in the prose - getting in the groove is actually a term I came to think of first with Saramago.

The essayist now arrives at explaining McCarthy's vulnerability:

Looking at them, Salter’s sentences, out here on their own, asking for so much, is like overhearing a deeply personal, desperate prayer—the embarrassment of glimpsing someone beg God for help. This, I think, is what separates Salter and McCarthy from other writers whose unit is also the novel—the Becketts and Lispectors and Saramagos. Those writers’ novels too carry a hypnotic, mystic quality; a babbling incantation. But they’re not vulnerable so much as indifferent, even confident; they don’t want in the way Suttree wants. McCarthy’s “singular” prose is vulnerable because it wants to untangle life on earth, and there’s a sense that he felt he shouldn’t have let us see this desire—that he should have known better than to trust us. It echoes the vulnerability of James Wright’s volta, “I have wasted my life.”

 This is the second major aspect of McCarthy’s style.

When I finished the preceding quotes, I saw the essayist's meaning of vulnerability. Not quite about an open style as using the style to present the vulnerability of the character's soul. And how often is that really done? 

I do not have an MFA, not even a degree in creative writing. Yes, while in prison, I did join several writing groups. Yes, we critiqued each other, but also encouraged what was attempted. I do wonder if this explains a certain emotional blandness I see in much current writing.

And then there are our younger (and not so young) novelists, debut and mid-career. I don’t want to be another one of these guys, but it’s hard not to wonder if the near omnipresence of the MFA system has nurtured prose styles that favor defensive rather than vulnerable prose. After all, most American writers are trained to anticipate criticism before they write. With the workshop in mind, criticism of the work exists, willingly or not, alongside even its earliest pages. Substitute “photograph,” in this essay, with “teach,” and this seems especially revealing with respect to passages from famous writers’ novels.

As if that weren’t difficult enough, most novelists now graduate from writing with a workshop of peers living in their head to writing with thousands other writers, readers, and industry professionals living there too—a literary city that never sleeps and whose criticisms or rejections one can read or see instantaneously, at any hour. Even for the most resolute, this kind of presence can’t not have an enormous effect on the openness, on the willingness to risk, in one’s style—not to mention, made up as it is of a plurality of styles, on American literature itself.

Which seems like the point to bring up The Drift Magazine's  Publicists, Manifesto Pushers, Propagandists​ | What Happened to the Avant-Garde?

It’s commonplace to note that sociopolitical upheaval and artistic experimentation often flourish side by side. But today — despite an alleged “polycrisis” — new modes of cultural production don’t seem to be emerging. Three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent George Floyd rebellion, the arts seem stagnant and stubbornly centralized: franchise fare dominates at the box office; literary output is hampered by monopolized publishers; even the obsession with so-called nepo babies suggests a cultural bloodline without disruption. The internet, meanwhile, tends to both homogenize art and silo audiences by algorithm. We’ve begun to wonder if we’re overlooking experimental movements, or if they’re going extinct.

Is there a connection? Where I live, my age, put me as far as possible from any kind of avant garde. Out here we are just trying to getting into the 2st Century. However, I do find that to be a freedom - write about what I want, the way I want. Not that it has endeared me to editors, or to some readers.  I was in prison, the one publication I have had astounds me, and do not suggest you free yourself by becoming a felon. There has to be other ways to free your imagination. I may not get further in completing the work I have taken up again, and I will take that as my pay for not having enough faith 40 years ago, but what of you who read this who desire to be writers (or what to take up any of the other arts)? Will you go shrinking back into the dark, or dare to act? Good luck, if you choose the latter. This world needs you.

As part of the Drift collection is History Is a Merry-Go-Round​ by Marta Figlerwoicz, and I thought this relevant here:

Today, as in the fin de siècle, when we look toward the future we often — consciously or not — imagine some kinds of people as intrinsically closer to it by virtue of their gender, race, ethnicity, or geographical location. Cathy Park Hong made this point powerfully a decade ago, calling out the racism of the American literary establishment in her “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde.” In that essay, she argues that some of our most innovative contemporary writers — Black Took Collective, Bhanu Kapil, Tan Lin, M. NourbeSe Philip, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, and others — explore how the communities the avant-garde speaks for and addresses can be expanded. They work toward this expansion by “code-switching between languages, between Englishes, between genres, between races, between bodies.” They strive to highlight the intersectionalities in which we live and relate to each other, underscoring bonds between people and between communities that are not tied to old Hegelian narratives of development and underdevelopment, of revolution as a march into a modernity that we are supposed to universally desire. 

These writers, whom Hong correctly identifies as a cultural vanguard, think about history in unexpected and original ways. What modernists taught us to understand as the future seems to them to have been a mirage, a way of reifying how different places around the globe and their inhabitants — those more and less developed — relate to one another. The alternative philosophy of history that they embrace is not Benjamin’s, though it bears a family relationship to it. Instead of wanting to get to the future quicker, these contemporary writers, most of them people of color and many of them queer-identifying, want to be able to time-travel non-linearly, with as much flexibility as possible. If Benjamin dreams of taking a “tiger’s leap” into the past, these writers dream of leaping between the past and future, and between different pasts and different futures.

The author says these writers look to write a new future, why not? And why not write as they will about they see? 

Back to Cormac McCarthy & the Vulnerable Style: Cormac McCarthy (1933-2023) for what seems like a fitting conclusion

I certainly don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing like Denis Johnson, one of most invigorating and rewarding American fiction writers we’ve had. As is Toni Morrison, and Leslie Silko, and so on. But I do think there is an error in rebuffing a writer of equal genius by treating his sentences as one treats theirs, trying to exchange one currency into another. This has nothing to do with the way these novels themselves ask to be read; but it does have everything to do with the way neoliberal attitudes have colonized so thoroughly what readers and writers, in this version of culture, permit themselves to think. It’s that impulse itself—to exchange—that seems so insidious. Sure, the novels are violent; yes, they’re embarrassingly short of women; but that a writer of McCarthy’s stature and originality and vulnerability could be considered to veer “close to nonsense” in his style, or to be derided for his prose the day after his death, is the kind of reactionary critique only a repressively homogenous culture could coerce from a reader. That Cormac McCarthy was here, that he formed his sensibility, that he wrote such novels, that he enjoyed his life, and that we still have his books; that he arrived, over and over, at such style, is truly so singular as to seem impossible. But it happened. And that—whoever you are and whatever you’re after—is your open invitation.

sch 7/20