Monday, December 31, 2007

Cormac McCarthy may be a Genius: Exhibit A

His voice is reminiscent of Hemingway's: telegraphic and startlingly and starkly descriptive and utterly lean. And he does translation the way that Hemingway (or really anyone writing Spanish for English readers) does--elevated diction and a dancing twist of syntax. But I think there's something more to McCarthy. The timbre of his voice varies with his characters and his narrators and his stories more than I anticipated it would and more, I think, than Hemingway did. I just finished the priest/hermit's narrative in The Crossing and a) was completely enthralled despite the abstractions and woven-through crazy, b) caught myself not once startled at and convinced by the authenticity and integrity and discreteness of the voice. I thought I might've been fooled by Oprah and that maybe McCarthy has been oversold, but the more I read the more I'm being persuaded.

4 comments:

JKC said...

I'm definitely a McCarthy convert. It began with All the Pretty Horses (which is really a deceptively girly name for that story, but then again, so is the protagonist's name). It continued last year with The Road. It has been revived by the fact that I was given The Crossing and Cities of the Plain for Christmas.

I get the Hemingway comparison, but the thing that strikes me about McCarthy is not just that his writing is, like Hemingway's, spare, but more so, that he weaves the landscape into everything, more than Hemingway. Hemingway does that a little bit, I guess, but he's almost always in an urban or village setting. McCarthy on the other hand is often focused on the wild, violent, bare, hard, natural world. Usually, it's one man in the middle of that world.

It reminds me a little of Jack London and John Krakauer, but more refined, less egocentric, less romantic, and yet more elegiac. How does he do that? The man's a magician---no, actually, a shaman.

Zengine said...

Paco stalled in the sun by the stream where the branch bound crow tore at rotten fruit to the cascade of water dirtied by diesel and benzene and delirium. He stooped and drank and he watched the crow but the crow turned a black eye downward, ruffling its feathers as it spat a rancid seed into nightmares and weeds.

He shouted, waving arms like some ancient wind milling beast creaking up from the ground kicking sod and soil and desiccated bones of ancestors gone like ghosts, and the crow paused; Paco’s eye found the fruit and his tongue lapped his lips but the crow is as nature and giveth no man what he cannot win.

The crow cawed once, flew up through brambles toward the hating sun, dropping feathers black like ashen spirits and the fruit splattered onto a rock where Paco knelt and sucked at the rotting nectar. He pulled the dripping skin to his lips and slurped, winced, and he furrowed eyes at the heat and he sucked pulp to his throat until it was dry and the skin became husk and the husk was a floating thing on the stream like a sail without a boat.

Yeah, there's your 'genius'. That took me five minutes.

"It sucks," you might say. But nay: if McCarty had written it, and he certainly could have, it would be to swoon for.

McCarty is way too overrated.

Unknown said...

@ Zengine

No. You did not imitate McCarthy well at all.
I get increasingly tired of people like you the older i get, people who look around for something a lot of people like and feel all proud and smug and ballsy to say, "That thing you and your fellow fans like is overrated." Fuck you. McCarthy didn't write that jarringly awkward bullshit above because it sucks, because he's a genius, and because you can't deal with that.

Anonymous said...

Agree with Reginald 100%: Zengine, you are such a fool. Moreover: a wanker. There is many like you around, if that's any consolation. Probably it is not. Because you are convinced you are special, 'smart'. You are not. You only another tiny fool. Anyone with a very marked style can be subject to parody. But you just proved the point: you can get a very vague idea of the general twists, but what you wrote is simply clumsy, awful, stupid. It has no honesty, no rythm, no aesthetic pleasure, no nothing. Zengine, change your mindset before is too late, change your life...