Cormac McCarthy’s Word Films
Critic Harold Bloom has described some of McCarthy’s work as derivative of William Faulkner’s and other work, Blood Meridian, as among the highest of American aesthetic achievements. Critic James Wood has lauded McCarthy’s style in The New Yorker and other publications with inspired lyricism, and then seemed to conclude that there is some palpable silliness or even insanity in it.
My own first encounter with McCarthy’s style was in 1992, when I read All the Pretty Horses for the first time. I had read some Faulkner, some Shakespeare, and much of the King James Bible, all of which have been mentioned as McCarthy’s influences, but none of those other things operated on me in quite the way that McCarthy’s work had.
McCarthy’s prose has at least two very different registers (in this he resembles Faulkner), but in its “lower” register it has a hypnotic effect like no other I have read. Over and over, the author describes the quotidian processes of concrete existence in mind-numbing detail to seemingly no narrative purpose. The examples are myriad; here is one from All the Pretty Horses in which side-kick Lacy Rawlins tries to produce his wallet for a corrupt lawman in Mexico: “Rawlins reached around to his left rear pocket with his manacled hands. He could reach the pocket but he couldnt reach into it. The captain nodded and one of the guards stepped forward and took out the billfold and handed it across to the captain. The captain leaned back in the chair. Quita las esposas, he said.”
I wrote above that this bright light on the most mundane details of life’s live action is done to no narrative purpose, but what I really mean is that it is done to a different purpose from that of any other fiction writer I know of. I believe that McCarthy’s novels, at least from All the Pretty Horses going forward, are verbal story boards for the movies that McCarthy is streaming into the reader’s head.
Cormac McCarthy’s idiosyncratic presentation of the usually unremarkable physical movements of characters, main and minor, represents a narrative strategy unlike any other that I know of. He is presenting a streaming narrative in textual form that would normally appear in film or video.
This strategy carries high risk; it is something like the opposite of what filmmaker Stanley Kubric does in his films, some of which have been criticized for perceived weaknesses in their narrative structure. Kubric uses a visual grammar to express what other directors/writers only know how to express in verbal terms.
Stanley Kubric presents verbal stories in largely visual terms; Cormac McCarthy presents largely visual narratives in his, at times, Melvillian-Skakespearean-King-Jamesian prose. No other writer that I have read has tried such a thing.
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