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Thanks for the great OP3Romeo, I really enjoyed your analysis in the last thread! For any of you who might be on the fence about McCarthy I really suggest you give it a go. Some non-literary types write off McCarthy's style as being pretentious, but it's really not. He doesn't describe mundane things in overwrought prose, he describes artful things of depth and consequence in the only way they can be communicated. Here's some of my favorite passages from Blood Meridian. Check out this sick rear end personification of Death: quote:The dust the party raised was quickly dispersed and lost in the immensity of that landscape and there was no dust other for the pale sulter who pursued them drives unseen and his lean horse and his lean cart leave no track upon such ground or any ground. By a thousand fires in the iron blue dusk he keeps his commissary and he's a wry and grinning tradesman good to follow every campaign or hound men from their holes in just those whited regions where they've gone to hide from God. Here's an insight into one of his badass characters based on the historical murderer and fortune seeker, John Glanton: quote:He watched the fire and if he saw portents there it was much the same to him. He would live to look upon the western sea and he was equal to whatever might follow for he was complete at every hour. Whether his history should run concomitant with men and nations, whether it should cease. He'd long forsworn all weighing of consequence and allowing as he did that men's destinies are ever given yet he usurped to contain within him all that he would ever be in the world and all that the world would be to him and be his charter written in the urstone itself he claimed agency and said so and he'd drive the remorseless sun on to its final endarkenment as if he'd ordered it all ages since, before there were paths anywhere, before there were men or suns to go upon them.
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Aug 26, 2012 21:58
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gunblade posted:Hey, where in the book is this from? I don't even remember it from my first readthrough, and I'd love to go back and read the passage.
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Sep 3, 2012 22:58
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I thought the Pale Light in the West album kind of missed the mark in capturing the themes and general feeling of Blood Meridian. It seemed trite, for the lack of a better word. But that's just my impression.
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Apr 23, 2013 22:14
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Oxxidation posted:See, this is the kind of thing that I would consider a downside. The book has hardly any plot or forward movement to speak of. It's 400 pages of turgid word games with next to nothing in terms of action or character conflict. But if those things are what you read books for, then you know. Ok.
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Apr 25, 2013 19:51
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Low Desert Punk posted:I might make an
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May 9, 2013 06:34
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post sometime talking about firearms in the works of Cormac McCarthy, both explicitly mentioned and what I theorize are being used based on the time period and other clues. The point is, he knows his stuff, and it almost seems impossible how wide his knowledge reaches.
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I think there's a mystic element to the Judge that isn't designed to be decoded. Like a kind of living symbol.quote:Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.
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May 9, 2013 20:28
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mdemone posted:To me, that passage evokes the ontological gap between man and nature, in part because the Judge is to his foes as we are to this planet: a radical breach in the organic order, and an invincible force of sundering. quote:The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning. But I think the Judge manifests the closing of that gap, the conquest of will over the natural order. quote:Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.
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May 11, 2013 20:01
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Regarding the ending scene 3Romeo posted an interpretation that I've liked more and more with re-readthroughs. Reposting here for those who don't have archives3Romeo posted:As a result, I believe in that sceneless scene in the jakes, McCarthy doesn't describe what happens to the Kid not because he wants to leave that depravity to the reader's mind but because he (as he often does) jumps completely into metaphor. The Judge taking from the Kid the violence of his heart and making it his own. The West not pacified by man but man pacified by the West. What remains of the Kid then is nothing more than a man who, with that violence taken from his heart, digs the holes in the epilogue and lights the fires that show men the way, either because of his experience or, because he is "now divested of everything he has been," the west is safe to men like him and all men that follow because the west has proven itself superior.
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Jun 27, 2013 01:19
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Noctis Horrendae posted:How do you guys get used to McCarthy's writing style? I've tried to read The Road about three times now, and between his run-on sentences and lack of quotation marks I've outright given up. Are there any editions with proper grammar that are still for sale?
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Jan 18, 2014 05:01
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Noctis Horrendae posted:I don't get how you guys find this so revolutionary and eye-opening. The prose reads like a six year old's work in some bits due to the absence of grammar. For example I don't really like Melville's style but Moby Dick and Bartleby are both impactful works that I enjoyed reading more after the fact than while I was reading them.
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Jan 19, 2014 22:53
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Noctis Horrendae posted:I guess coming to the McCarthy thread and bitching about McCarthy was pretty dumb. Pulling out after this post. I can say that I enjoy his style but it does get a little much. It's what he says more than how he says it that I find compelling about his work.
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Jan 19, 2014 23:17
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Rabbit Hill posted:I never thought I'd be saying this in this thread, but....I'm a big fan of P.G. Wodehouse, and that's one of the problems when it comes to adapting his writing, too -- his plots are quite weak, but the narration makes up for it in spades. Yet the Stephen Fry & Hugh Laurie adaptations do a good job in that they don't try to represent the narration in any form but instead they rely on the comedic strength of the actors to convey they same tone. They're still no substitute for the written form, but they're a good time on their own.
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Oct 21, 2014 14:27
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Movie chat sucks.Blood Meridian posted:Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they'd heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang. Out of that whirlwind no voice spoke and the pilgrim lying in his broken bones may cry out and in his anguish he may rage, but rage at what? And if the dried and blackened shell of him is found among the sands by travelers to come yet who can discover the engine of his ruin?
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Oct 23, 2014 17:12
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Jewmanji posted:Is there any critical consensus or discussion about McCarthy's depiction of people of color, particularly in Suttree (but at least in Blood Meridian as well). There are plenty of times when, as the narrator, he describes a person of color in a way that is undoubtedly unacceptable by modern standards. I generally think McCarthy is above reproach in almost every respect, but sometimes it makes me slightly uneasy- is there any explanation for this type of language that squares with people? To the extent that it's a derogatory description as often as it's neutral, are we to simply accept that we're being narrated a story from an unseen person who is living in the era (and is presumably white), and therefore they get a pass? It just comes across as somewhat jarring, given the wonderfully god-like perspective McCarthy paints his environments in, you'd expect that he'd be a little bit more egalitarian in his treatment of his characters. Blood Meridian posted:They is four things that can destroy the earth, he said. Women, whiskey, money, and niggers.
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Dec 1, 2014 15:36
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