6 ms·

One of the funny things about McCarthy is how he is associated with minimalism. It forces you to really think about what "minimalism" means. While his punctuati

by scop 3y ago

One of the funny things about McCarthy is how he is associated with minimalism. It forces you to really think about what "minimalism" means. While his punctuation is minimal, his writing is not "short". But his writing is distilled. As the article notes, while he has less punctuation than Faulkner he has double the words per mark. How can a writer be minimal when his sentences are longer? It's easy to see when you read him: he paints an image so vividly (even when the image itself is unsure/opaque!), that you can hardly imagine adding or removing a word.

scop 3y ago
> On the mountain the limestone shelves and climbs in ragged escarpments among the clutching roots of hickories, oaks and tulip poplars which even here brace themselves against the precarious declination allowed them by the chance drop of a seed. - The Orchard Keeper, pg 11 (his first novel) For example, one could easily dice this sentence into multiple sentences or divide it with a semicolon. Somebody could also remove several words. But there is an image so completely captured by the sentence, an image in its fullness, that I can only admire it.
- logicprog 3y ago
  I have very bad brain fog today, so this might be that talking, but I don't even know for certain how to parse that sentence grammatically. There doesn't seem to be a verb or object, only one long extended subject, unless both "shelves" and "climbs" are verbs, in which case thats some serious Calvin-and-Hobbes verbing, but it works I suppose. In any case trying to understand this sentence required several read-throughs before I came up with the second explanation, and made my headache about two increments worse. I'm not a huge fan. It doesn't matter much to me whether writing is "difficult" in to sense of having a lot of big words, complex sentence structure, or long sentences, but I hate ambiguous writing.
  - scop 3y ago
    Nope you’re not off. I chose McCarthy’s earliest novel because it is him at his most “impressionistic” and indeed many sentences require multiple read through to determine what’s being said. But that’s the artistic pleasure in it: a scene is painted slowly in my mind’s eyes that, once fully formed/comprehended, is hard to find elsewhere in literature. This being art, you are completely free to find it off putting and completely ignore it. But I’ve found beauty in McCarthy that is, well, hard to put into words. His writing, much like technical documentation, can require many readings to get the picture.
    - logicprog 3y ago
      You know, I think I can actually dig what you're getting at! :) It's not really for me, I like a lot more immediate clarity in the individual sentences of my fiction books, because for larger works like novels having to reread sentences feels more to me like being tripped up then getting a chance to admire a line of poetry or something, but I can totally see where you're coming from
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        >> On the mountain the limestone shelves and climbs in ragged escarpments... The interesting twist to me is the mental back-rewrite on "limestone shelves" I initially read it as the more common {adjective}{noun}, before hitting "and climbs" and having to backtrack and reclassify as {noun}{verb}. And indeed, there is such a verb definition for "shelve": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shelve https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shelve I was a huge William Gibson fan in my youth though, which generally meant I figured out what the hell the author was talking about 3 sentences or pages later.
        logicprog 3y ago
        Interestingly, I'm actually a huge fan of Gibson's prose (reading Idoru rn, finished the Sprawl Trilogy and Burning Chrome last year), and even though I've been reading his stuff with the same neurological disorder I have now, I've never felt like I struggled to understand what he was saying.
  - beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
    What you're missing is some context to McCarthy's writing which is the specific voice he uses in a book like Orchard Keeper (in addition to the plot of course). It's a southern style famously associated with Faulkner and meant to mimic the spoken word of regional Southern areas in many ways. It helps to read it out loud. You called it "ambiguous", but McCarthy's writing is often extremely verbose, an avalanche of specificity, painting extremely evocative landscapes and imagery. Here for instance is his famous description of a Comanche sneak attack: > A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
    - logicprog 3y ago
      I do like that passage a lot! It jives much better with my reader's sensibilities.
      - logicprog 3y ago
        I don't really know why I'm getting downvoted here, so in case it's a matter of misunderstanding my meaning — I'm not saying the content aligns with my sensibilities necessarily (the depictions of indigenous people), I'm saying the writing style does.
  - solardev 3y ago
    I believe it's just saying "a few unlucky trees have taken root upon this steep and rocky cliff". I don't really like fanciful writing like that either, but to each their own! I feel like mass media writing has gotten simpler in recent times, targeting a lower grade level than before. Good for me, bad for folks who prefer poetic scenery.
    - scop 3y ago
      I don't think it's fair that this is being downvoted. It's a valid take, even if one disagrees with it. Let's break down the original quote a bit: > On the mountain the limestone shelves and climbs in ragged escarpments There is a mountain with limestone. We are thrown by "shelves" because this is an unusual verb, making us feel uneasy. "Climbs" gives a personal sense to the mountain. Both imply, to me, a laborious nature to the scene. I behold in my mind's eye a mountain with true weight and scale, not just "a mountain". > among the clutching roots of hickories, oaks and tulip poplars "Clutching". Do trees clutch? Certainly they do. Do we think of them as clutching? Clutching implies an active and focused activity, as opposed to the normal sense in which we view trees as simply being "rooted" in an established way. "Clutching" is often momentary or done in an emergency/needed situation, so we immediately get a sense that these trees are on odd angles with an odd look to compensate for that. > which even here brace themselves against the precarious declination The trees are in a "precarious" situation. Are trees in danger? Sure. Though to me there is also a hint of personhood being implied here. Can plants be in danger? Sure. Who cares? Well, plants care. They accommodate the elements just like we do. Are plants different than us? Are we different than plants? Just what is "danger" in nature, as for us humans danger is very much tied with personhood. Is there a personhood in nature or behind nature? > allowed them by the chance drop of a seed. Ah, and then here we are amid all this "drama" of the tree on the hill when we remember it all began by the "chance dropping of a seed". How did all of these seed come from chance? Does that render it pointless? Is it pointless? How to chance and meaning interplay? I'm not going to answer of the questions posed (though I have some personal beliefs/answers), but these are just the questions it all brings to mind. To me McCarthy's writing brings the universe's embedded sense of deep meaning/purpose to the forefront and forces the reader to answer: does this matter? McCarthy does not provide an answer.
DontchaKnowit 3y ago
Surprised to hear he is associated with minimalism. I read half of one of his books and it seemed really maximalist thematically and narratively. Very gratuitous, flippant, unstructured, violent, sexual, etc. Very little subtlety or restraint.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
  Only some of his books are associated with minimalism in the common parlance of the word. A book like The Road or No Country for Old Men is wildly more minimalistic than Blood Meridian or Suttree.
  - stvltvs 3y ago
    I haven't read every McCarthy novel, but from what I've seen, he wrote less flowery prose in his later works.
jonstewart 3y ago
Raymond Carver defined minimalism as “the gradual accretion of meaningful detail, the concrete word as opposed to the abstract.” McCarthy’s writing seems to fit that to a T.

by scop 3y ago

scop 3y ago

> On the mountain the limestone shelves and climbs in ragged escarpments among the clutching roots of hickories, oaks and tulip poplars which even here brace themselves against the precarious declination allowed them by the chance drop of a seed. - The Orchard Keeper, pg 11 (his first novel) For example, one could easily dice this sentence into multiple sentences or divide it with a semicolon. Somebody could also remove several words. But there is an image so completely captured by the sentence, an image in its fullness, that I can only admire it.

logicprog 3y ago
I have very bad brain fog today, so this might be that talking, but I don't even know for certain how to parse that sentence grammatically. There doesn't seem to be a verb or object, only one long extended subject, unless both "shelves" and "climbs" are verbs, in which case thats some serious Calvin-and-Hobbes verbing, but it works I suppose. In any case trying to understand this sentence required several read-throughs before I came up with the second explanation, and made my headache about two increments worse. I'm not a huge fan. It doesn't matter much to me whether writing is "difficult" in to sense of having a lot of big words, complex sentence structure, or long sentences, but I hate ambiguous writing.
- scop 3y ago
  Nope you’re not off. I chose McCarthy’s earliest novel because it is him at his most “impressionistic” and indeed many sentences require multiple read through to determine what’s being said. But that’s the artistic pleasure in it: a scene is painted slowly in my mind’s eyes that, once fully formed/comprehended, is hard to find elsewhere in literature. This being art, you are completely free to find it off putting and completely ignore it. But I’ve found beauty in McCarthy that is, well, hard to put into words. His writing, much like technical documentation, can require many readings to get the picture.
  - logicprog 3y ago
    You know, I think I can actually dig what you're getting at! :) It's not really for me, I like a lot more immediate clarity in the individual sentences of my fiction books, because for larger works like novels having to reread sentences feels more to me like being tripped up then getting a chance to admire a line of poetry or something, but I can totally see where you're coming from
    - ethbr1 3y ago
      >> On the mountain the limestone shelves and climbs in ragged escarpments... The interesting twist to me is the mental back-rewrite on "limestone shelves" I initially read it as the more common {adjective}{noun}, before hitting "and climbs" and having to backtrack and reclassify as {noun}{verb}. And indeed, there is such a verb definition for "shelve": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shelve https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shelve I was a huge William Gibson fan in my youth though, which generally meant I figured out what the hell the author was talking about 3 sentences or pages later.
      - logicprog 3y ago
        Interestingly, I'm actually a huge fan of Gibson's prose (reading Idoru rn, finished the Sprawl Trilogy and Burning Chrome last year), and even though I've been reading his stuff with the same neurological disorder I have now, I've never felt like I struggled to understand what he was saying.
- beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
  What you're missing is some context to McCarthy's writing which is the specific voice he uses in a book like Orchard Keeper (in addition to the plot of course). It's a southern style famously associated with Faulkner and meant to mimic the spoken word of regional Southern areas in many ways. It helps to read it out loud. You called it "ambiguous", but McCarthy's writing is often extremely verbose, an avalanche of specificity, painting extremely evocative landscapes and imagery. Here for instance is his famous description of a Comanche sneak attack: > A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
  - logicprog 3y ago
    I do like that passage a lot! It jives much better with my reader's sensibilities.
    - logicprog 3y ago
      I don't really know why I'm getting downvoted here, so in case it's a matter of misunderstanding my meaning — I'm not saying the content aligns with my sensibilities necessarily (the depictions of indigenous people), I'm saying the writing style does.
- solardev 3y ago
  I believe it's just saying "a few unlucky trees have taken root upon this steep and rocky cliff". I don't really like fanciful writing like that either, but to each their own! I feel like mass media writing has gotten simpler in recent times, targeting a lower grade level than before. Good for me, bad for folks who prefer poetic scenery.
  - scop 3y ago
    I don't think it's fair that this is being downvoted. It's a valid take, even if one disagrees with it. Let's break down the original quote a bit: > On the mountain the limestone shelves and climbs in ragged escarpments There is a mountain with limestone. We are thrown by "shelves" because this is an unusual verb, making us feel uneasy. "Climbs" gives a personal sense to the mountain. Both imply, to me, a laborious nature to the scene. I behold in my mind's eye a mountain with true weight and scale, not just "a mountain". > among the clutching roots of hickories, oaks and tulip poplars "Clutching". Do trees clutch? Certainly they do. Do we think of them as clutching? Clutching implies an active and focused activity, as opposed to the normal sense in which we view trees as simply being "rooted" in an established way. "Clutching" is often momentary or done in an emergency/needed situation, so we immediately get a sense that these trees are on odd angles with an odd look to compensate for that. > which even here brace themselves against the precarious declination The trees are in a "precarious" situation. Are trees in danger? Sure. Though to me there is also a hint of personhood being implied here. Can plants be in danger? Sure. Who cares? Well, plants care. They accommodate the elements just like we do. Are plants different than us? Are we different than plants? Just what is "danger" in nature, as for us humans danger is very much tied with personhood. Is there a personhood in nature or behind nature? > allowed them by the chance drop of a seed. Ah, and then here we are amid all this "drama" of the tree on the hill when we remember it all began by the "chance dropping of a seed". How did all of these seed come from chance? Does that render it pointless? Is it pointless? How to chance and meaning interplay? I'm not going to answer of the questions posed (though I have some personal beliefs/answers), but these are just the questions it all brings to mind. To me McCarthy's writing brings the universe's embedded sense of deep meaning/purpose to the forefront and forces the reader to answer: does this matter? McCarthy does not provide an answer.

DontchaKnowit 3y ago

Surprised to hear he is associated with minimalism. I read half of one of his books and it seemed really maximalist thematically and narratively. Very gratuitous, flippant, unstructured, violent, sexual, etc. Very little subtlety or restraint.

beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
Only some of his books are associated with minimalism in the common parlance of the word. A book like The Road or No Country for Old Men is wildly more minimalistic than Blood Meridian or Suttree.
- stvltvs 3y ago
  I haven't read every McCarthy novel, but from what I've seen, he wrote less flowery prose in his later works.

jonstewart 3y ago

Raymond Carver defined minimalism as “the gradual accretion of meaningful detail, the concrete word as opposed to the abstract.” McCarthy’s writing seems to fit that to a T.