The Internet often misses the point with McCarthy
Let me say first, the post title and my overall point is hyperbolic and I think the fact that people are enjoying his work, hell, the fact that people are consuming fiction at all is a beautiful, beautiful thing. It’s infinitely more admirable than most modern hobbies, in my opinion.
This topic’s been rehashed a thousand times (and I’m likely preaching to the choir here. This is more aimed at other areas of the internet), so I apologize for another drop in the ocean…
I wish I was better at ignoring things, but some of the discourse surrounding Cormac’s work makes me scratch my head. And I think it can sometimes even dissuade outsiders that may be weighing trying a book of his.
I think a lot of outsiders view McCarthy through the lens of machismo. Like another incarnation of Hemingway. (though here, we all understand that their writing styles are oceans apart) They see no quotation marks. They hear about the violence. They hear a plot summary. They hear how Blood Meridian is his iconic work and is “THE MOST DISTURBING, BLOODY THING EVER WRITTEN!!!11” This all, in my opinion, mischaracterizes what McCarthy does on the page.
To me, first and foremost, Cormac is a POET. Yes, the plots of his novels are interesting and thematically rich, his characters leap off the page, etc. But what makes him transcendent, at least to me, is the sheer beauty of his prose. Yet it feels like when people are pitching McCarthy to others (or discussing his work generally), it’s mostly about the violence. The plot. About Judge Holden or that Cellar in The Road. And if this sort of discussion gets edgelords into reading, then hell yeah, I’m all for it. But these things don’t really represent Cormac’s work, in my opinion. They’re a teeny slice of a much larger, prose pie.
Honestly, fuck Judge Holden, fuck that Human Farm…have you read the first page of Suttree?! Have you been brought near-to-tears by the description of a sunset?! (again, I’m being hyperbolic) Obviously: Style, plot, character, all intertwine to make a great novel, but what separates McCarthy’s stories, to me, is the poetry with which he tells it.
That’s why I find a lot of adaptation talk strange. With more plot-forward authors, yeah, adaptations can be awesome. But I don’t think that’s McCarthy.
“They were watching, out there past men's knowing, where stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.”
How the hell are you adapting that to the visual medium? And that is what makes his novels great. But that’s not how swaths of the internet talk about McCarthy. Those lines, of which there are thousands throughout his writing, to me, hold infinitely more weight than a tree full of dead babies. Than Judge Holden's dumb, shiny, bald head.