I was looking for some fiction to read.
Stumbled upon “Cormac McCarthy”.
Now some of his books have been adapted to films like:
The Road (2009)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
The Counsellor (2013)
I’ll just paste a compilation of his sentences from GoodReads bold not mine, used to separate sentences:
Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. No fall but preceded by a declination. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom. No one travelled this land. Ever’s a long time. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The sparks rushed upward and died in the starless dark. On this road there are no godspoke men. How does the never to be differ from what never was? By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp. The ash fell on the snow until it was all but black. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands. The day providential to itself. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance of pain. We’re survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp. A black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front of it. In the darkness and the silence he could see bits of light that appeared random on the night grid. The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. The dark serpentine of a dead vine running down it like the track of some enterprise on a graph. A single bit of sediment coiling in the jar on some slow hydraulic axis …a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. There is no God and we are his prophets. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo… Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. One vast salt sepulchre. There were few nights lying in the dark when he did not envy the dead. I will not send you into the darkness alone. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. A living man spoke these lines. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today.
I think it is, but, I kinda like it.
Because if it’s read for the sounds it produces, rather than for its meaning, it does make sense for ambient creation.
I guess that’s the appeal it has.
It was edited for clarity. “A boat pretentious writing” didn’t seem much like a pun. It seems like gibberish… or a Canadian preparing to discuss pretentious writing. Maybe that was the point? In any case, quirky or vague thread titles (outside of training logs where there’s more leeway) aren’t really a thing. It’s just house style to have thread titles be at least somewhat indicative of thread content.
I want to put the quote “anything that exists without my knowledge exists without my consent” on the wall of my gym. Such a well written character. Might have to read that book again.
I can’t remember the judge who said this, but he said he could tell when a lawyer had the weaker case: A lawyer with a weak case obfuscated the fact with big words and rambling nonsense.
When someone has something worthwhile to say, he or she says it with short sentences. And little words. So anyone can understand it.
These guys have no plot or story. So they say a bunch of babble that leaves the reader a bit befuddled.
The exception is when the SETTING and TONE is the story – Fitzgerald, for example.
But usually, it’s just lack of creativity enabled by a thesaurus.
It’s called ‘style.’ If his is too baroque for your taste, consider Hemingway instead. But no, his writing is not pretentious. (He’s wildly successful, award-winning and accomplished; why on earth would he need to be pretentious?)
Pretentious is the description of him that I most commonly see, and I can see why it is chosen.
He intentionally breaks the expected norms:
I believe in periods, in capitals, in the occasional comma, and that’s it.
The following situations arise:
No apostrophes:
The old man didnt answer.
It got ever opportunity. Likely it wont.
I couldnt tell ye.
No quotation marks (this is a dialogue between two):
I ask you something? Yes. Of course. Are we going to die? Sometime. Not now. And we’re still going south. Yes. So we’ll be warm. Yes. Okay. Okay what? Nothing. Just okay. Go to sleep. Okay.
He might have needed to be this radical to set himself apart from other writers.
But personally, after reading a few pages of his, I think that it works great for stream of thought scenario-building.
About the feeling of words, rather than their literal meaning.
I would say the ‘intentional breaking of expected norms’ is not an adequate working definition for, or example of, literary pretentiousness.
As a number of writers have employed stream-of-consciousness and/or eschewed punctuation, this is doubtful. More likely, doing so simply better captures what he’s trying to express (as you seem to suggest in your next comment). Obviously, it has been highly effective for him (although not to everyone’s taste/sensibilities).
From his Wiki entry:
"McCarthy is known for his sparse use of punctuation, even replacing most commas with “and” (a polysyndeton). He told Oprah Winfrey in an interview that he prefers “simple declarative sentences” and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but never semicolons. He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to “blot the page up with weird little marks”. Erik Hage notes that McCarthy’s dialogue also often lacks attribution, but that “[s]omehow…the reader remains oriented as to who is speaking.”
I’ve actually met the guy. He’s lived kind of all around where I live (Ruidosso, NM), either in El Paso or up towards Sante Fe. He would come around to high schools and read excerpts.
He’s a typical Yankee liberal who comes down from wherever and talks down to us Apache like we are morons that need the white man to tell us how to think. Sante Fe is full of them.
I did try reading several of his books on deployment (I read basically every book on the “Best Books of 100 years” list), but they moved pretty slow and you have to read in 10 minutes intervals (constant interruption of war or getting ready for war or whatever) so I’d lose my place and end up reading the same 5 pages over-and-over.
Perhaps if I was by a fire and had no where to go, I’d appreciate it more.
I think the plots and settings are pretty cool, mainly because I know the areas and the people (even some of the local families with names changes – the Yates family, in particular, was blended into “No Country” either by design or by osmosis of the local culture and tales).
But his prose is overwrought and gimicky. Bit like ee cummings in that regard. He’s a good enough writer he shouldn’t have to resort to cheap tricks.
Conventional punctuation is conventional not because it’s square and uncool, but because it greatly aids in precise communication and has been honed over 1000 years.
May I recommend ‘Last of the Breed’ by Louis Lamour.
The protagonist is a native American spy plane pilot who shares your distaste of being pandered to by know-it-all white people. I believe the character as either Sioux or Crow though, not Apache.
Also Lamour was a prize fighter and merchant mariner. He writes fist fights better than any author I’ve read. He really captures what it’s like.
It would be pretentious if I wrote it because I’m not good at big wordliness. But if he knows what they mean, then good on him for using so many at once.
Many authors believe eloquence can be reduced to a formula by liberally mixing in their literary solutions multi-syllabic, obscure words, lengthy descriptions, and copious quantities of similes and metaphors. However, great writing is more than the sum of its components.