More Thoughts on Cormac McCarthy - The Sound of Writing

 From The L.A. Times: Cormac McCarthy shaped a generation of writers like me — even when we didn’t admit it  more that deserves pointing out about Cormac McCarthy:

But something even more powerful was at work as I read, something harder to make sense of, let alone characterize: At the time I thought of it — always in italics — as the sound. Intuitively, on the margins of my consciousness, I came to understand: The sound was the thing. It set the mood, it lit the world, it kept everything in motion. This second lesson was, if possible, even more pivotal than the first: Never mind your plot outline, your carefully thought-out themes, your take on human nature. Forget your own name if you have to. It may take years, it may be agony — but find the sound. That’s all you need. The rest of it will follow.

The news of McCarthy’s death — somehow surprising, even startling, in spite of his age — is the reason, of course, for this belated mea culpa. I can’t help but think, looking back, that certain younger writers, myself included, resisted acknowledging McCarthy’s influence not because of what he was, necessarily, but because of what he represented — and whatever our conception of him now, he has also, with his passing, come to represent the past.

I agree about the sound of McCarthy's writing. Let me strike out here with a theory of my own - the theory of the influence of the King James Bible. This came to me while watching FX's Justified, listening to the cadences of some characters' dialog. I have not read enough Elmore Leonard to know how much of this is reflected throughout his writing. I think Moby Dick has it in spades. Hawthorne, too. I can hear it also in Huckleberry Finn, and in Faulkner. I wish I had it still.

I add this paragraph for a wholly personal reason - finding someone else not so impressed by John Updike, and who adores neither Bellow nor Mailer. I give Bellow more standing than mailer, but I never felt an intimate connection with his world as did with Roth or McCarthy. As for Roth and McCarthy, they are on opposite ends in my mind: McCarthy brings to mind the mythic and Roth is another factory town kid. Both, in my mind, show what can be done with the novel's form

White cisgender male though I am, far be it from me to disagree: I’ve never felt the awe and adoration for Bellow and Mailer and Irving that seemed mandatory among well-read middle-class readers of my parents’ generation, and I’ve always been slightly nauseated by Updike’s randiness and verbal exhibitionism. McCarthy, however, though he was born in the same year as Philip Roth, was never a member of that particular gentlemen’s club. I imagine he must have struck a writer like Updike as a walking anachronism, a coelacanth-like living fossil from the high modernist age. And in fact — occasionally for the worse, but very, very often for the better — that’s exactly what he was.

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From today's reading comes Cormac McCarthy’s Miracle by Kris Dougherty with this passage;

Images of death and destruction are rendered with living nouns, in cadences that entrance. McCarthy’s prose is incantatory in all of his novels, but never more so than in The Road. Robert Alter explains how McCarthy achieves his effect: “Sentence by parallel sentence, word by hard-edged word, [The Road] draws on the structures and something of the diction of the King James Version to forge without pathos a reality whose harshness beggars the imagination.”

The greater miracle, however, is how the use of biblical cadences and allusions underscores the fierce intimacy of father and son, lending the father’s quest a scriptural gravitas, while also suggesting that the act of “carrying the fire” is bound inextricably to the biblical text.

What the writer adds about McCarthy and grace should also be read, I am just noting I am not the only seeing the influence of the King James Bible.

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