Cormac McCarthy: The Road

[Heteronym]

The Road follows a father and son trying to subside in a world ravaged by an unexplained cataclysm that has killed almost all life, scorched most of the vegetation, poisoned all water and left the remaining human survivors to scavenge for the last quickly-disappearing resources left. People lead an itinerant life, always on the move, trying to stay alive one more day although there?s nothing to stay alive for, no hope, no purpose. For those luck plays a large role in finding things to keep them alive a little longer. Others have taken a more organized effort at survival and prey on other humans: cannibalism is an everyday fear for the father and son.

This was the first book I read in 2010 and it was a bad start. This was one of the worst novels I?ve read in a long time. In fact I read bad novels all the time, but the bad impression this one left me on was exacerbated by the fact that Cormac McCarthy is considered one of the best writers alive.

The prose is bad. I?ve read many people mock McCarthy?s simple prose, comparing it to the simple sentences of a kindergarten book. I don?t have a problem with simple prose. Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway excelled at it. But this is simple prose that only describes: it?s all about setting. It?s not even remarkable description, like in a 19th century naturalist novel that described a chair or wallpaper with intricate beauty. He describes things the way we see them, in all their dullness. Nothing happens inside the heads of his characters.

The prose is uniform, from start to finish. There?s a third person narrator, but the novel may as well have been narrated by the nameless man. Narration and dialogue are undistinguishable; the dialogue between the man and the boy is undistinguishable; their dialogues are undistinguishable from the other characters?. Everyone has the same voice, the style or tone never changes.

And worst of all, it?s humorless. Some will say that?s obvious, that?s the point, it?s a post-apocalyptic novel! But that?s what bothers me the most: the tone of solemnity and seriousness that infects every page, like McCarthy is passing down a pearl of wisdom to the mere mortals reading this novel. The stoicism of the characters is ridiculous. They?re not characters, they?re symbols, abstractions. This novel is not tragic. Tragedy, a much misunderstood term, involves the destruction of a character due to his own actions. Lear?s vanity, Hamlet?s indecision, etc. No, this novel is pathetic. From pathos, meaning pity, it literarily means worthy of pity. Everything is this novel is calculated to make you feel sorry for two uninteresting, flat characters. That?s the purpose of pathos, making you feel sorry for the horrible things that happen to people who don?t deserve misery. And it works, because as much as I despised it, I couldn?t help being in tears at the end when the dying man gives his farewell speech to the boy.

A tearful ending. Like in a Spielberg movie.

This novel is a farce, the seriousness of tone hides its hollowness. If a writer can?t find humor, irony or absurd in the idea of mankind being whipped out by a global cataclysm, he may as well give up being a writer. Because there?s nothing more absurd than two characters heroically trying to stay alive in a doomed world; this is the stuff of Beckett?s absurd theater. This solemn tone is well suited for the makers of cheap fiction who wallow in melodrama, but I cannot accept that a great writer can have such a narrow view of human existence. In the hands of a really great writer, like Jos? Saramago or Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez or Milan Kundera or Philip Roth, this novel would be a riot from start to finish; what wonderful observations they could make about us in these circumstances. In the hands of McCarthy, it is melodrama.

[saliotthomas]

Sure a good joke or two would have helped.

But amazingly, i never detected in your reviews or peremtory statement the slightess trace of humour.
A bit like a bold hair dresser trying to sell you some hair growing cream there hetero ! And i remenber your declaration about your mysentropism and your own dislike for humanity , pathetique and humourless.

This :D is as far as you go when you come to use humour.

I'm not going into a step by step critic of your review 'against all who loved it' and design to shock and stir shit and I notice that you do love attracting attention with your spitting on obviously liked works or all genre you have not clue about.
To close it, if you find the simplicity of Hemigway attractive, i'm quite please you despise (one of you strong point your hightness) McCarthy.
It's like a pimp talking about simplicity and elegance in clothing.

[Clarissa]

Heteronym


This was one of the worst novels I?ve read in a long time. In fact I read bad novels all the time, but the bad impression this one left me on was exacerbated by the fact that Cormac McCarthy is considered one of the best writers alive.

Having read the high praise this book received, I thought I must be wrong. I too disliked it - and did not find it particularly well written either.

Thank you for helping me to realise that I have not completely lost it!

[Mirabell]

I didn't hate it as much as you, but I found it a huge letdown after reading Blood Meridian, which is a brutal, stunning, amazing mess of a book; first I thought it was the contrast that made The Road look bad, but then I read Suttree which is almost as good as Blood Meridian, hilariously funny (but also dark), and also, much better than The Road.

[saliotthomas]

Heteronym
Having read the high praise this book received, I thought I must be wrong. I too disliked it - and did not find it particularly well written either.

Thank you for helping me to realise that I have not completely lost it!

Exactly my feeling when the first clever review came out about the Shadow of the wind, (notably Bjorn) who describe it as a good beach book, an okeyish thriller.
The difference being that those weren't abusing the book, worst in a long time, bad prose,ect.. and there was a good bit to say about pseudo poetic and cheap lyrical images.
I understand not liking a book, i do not certitudes about one own taste.

[ferns_dad]

[I][If a writer can’t find humor, irony or absurd in the idea of mankind being whipped out by a global cataclysm, he may as well give up being a writer. Because there’s nothing more absurd than two characters heroically trying to stay alive in a doomed world; this is the stuff of Beckett’s absurd theater. This solemn tone is well suited for the makers of cheap fiction who wallow in melodrama, but I cannot accept that a great writer can have such a narrow view of human existence. In the hands of a really great writer, like Jos? Saramago or Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez or Milan Kundera or Philip Roth, this novel would be a riot from start to finish; what wonderful observations they could make about us in these circumstances. In the hands of McCarthy, it is melodrama.

well, looking for humor in McCarthy is pretty pointless, he's got a pretty stark way of looking at life. Not your cuppa tea, obviously, but hardly a bad writer. None of the "really great writers" you list have written anything remotely similar, so your speculations as to what they might do with the concepts are just about as hollow as you claim McCarthy's prose is.......

[Mirabell]

well, looking for humor in McCarthy is pretty pointless,

Not true. IN this book, yes, but others, notably Suttree, have broad swathes of laugh.out-loud humor.

[ferns_dad]

Not true. IN this book, yes, but others, notably Suttree, have broad swathes of laugh.out-loud humor.

have to say, one of his earliest, and therefore not real indicative of his pov. I haven't read that one in some time, but recall it was full of some pretty standard Cormac ugly imagery.

[Mirabell]

have to say, one of his earliest, and therefore not real indicative of his pov. I haven't read that one in some time, but recall it was full of some pretty standard Cormac ugly imagery.

true, he makes use of both registers, and as a whole the book is pretty devastating, but it's undeniably funny, too. Come to think of it, there's humor in Blood Meridian, too. Just, uh, less of it. And more killing.

Suttree and Blood Meridian are among my favorite post WWII novels in English, I think.

The Road, uh, isn't. Heteronym was right on point when he called it a melodrama. It's weak and rather than being bleak, it's "bleak".

[Mirabell]

have to say, one of his earliest, and therefore not real indicative of his pov.

that's misleading. It's his fourth novel of only ten altogether. Blood Meridian is the fifth. Then the border trilogy and then his two weak last books.

[ferns_dad]

that's misleading. It's his fourth novel of only ten altogether. Blood Meridian is the fifth. Then the border trilogy and then his two weak last books.

well, 4th of ten, but 30 years ago?

[Mirabell]

well, 4th of ten, but 30 years ago?

used to be a slow writer. not as slow as pynchon but still. pretty slow. look at the gaps between the books.

[saliotthomas]

The Road, uh, isn't. Heteronym was right on point when he called it a melodrama. It's weak and rather than being bleak, it's "bleak".

It's the ending that make it so.
I did'nt mind.
I need to read more McCarthy, but even this was not that bad.
I'm a good public when it come to post apocalyptic stuff but say compare to On the beach that was really bad (not aging well) or pesthouse by Jim Crace quite good. It stand it's ground.
I think it's fame and the film that will start everyone throwing turd at it.
The originality complexe.

[Stewart]

I read The Road a couple of years ago and enjoyed it so far, eventually being let down by the end. It just wasn't bleak enough, for my preferences anyway. And then, yesterday, I went to see Hillcoat's adaptation and it struck me, even though I knew about McCarthy's situation in writing it, how personal it probably was to him in that he was in his early seventies when he wrote it. He has a young son, to whom the book is dedicated, and McCarthy knows he won't be around long to see the boy grow up. To this extent he can only provide for him so far and be a father as best he can for as long as he can. It's effectively his predicament of raising a child before sending him off into the world to fend for himself as all parents must do and come to terms with.

[e joseph]

...a riot from start to finish...
I wish this had been the Bloom blurb on the back of the book. Without factchecking, I'm going to guess it wasn't. I agree with most other McCarthy readers here that The Road is not the classic McCarthy text. I certainly didn't loath it, but I found it unremarkable. At the risk of beating a dead horse, check out Blood Meridian before tossing his works out the window. Suttree's sitting somewhere on my bookshelf to be read soon(ish), and I'm expecting good things from that one as well.


Nothing happens inside the heads of his characters.
I'm guessing you mean that we're not told what happens in the minds of the characters, right? I kinda like this aspect of most(all?) of his works. I get a little tired sometimes of being told what characters are thinking.


The prose is uniform, from start to finish. There?s a third person narrator, but the novel may as well have been narrated by the nameless man. Narration and dialogue are undistinguishable; the dialogue between the man and the boy is undistinguishable; their dialogues are undistinguishable from the other characters?. Everyone has the same voice, the style or tone never changes.
This is what maybe bothers me most about McCarthy's latest works - sidenote: don't follow this one up with No Country for Old Men. The last Cormac McCarthy book I read was Outer Dark, and the contrast between simple dialog and overdone prose narrative is awesome. From what I remember, ditto Blood Meridian.

[ferns_dad]

you might almost think the lack of scinitillating dialog was planned?

[e joseph]

you might almost think the lack of scinitillating dialog was planned?
That doesn't mean you have to like it.

I do, but I can see how it would drive others nuts.

edit: Unless you mean this thread, and then: No, I don't think it was. Unplanned.

[Heteronym]

None of the "really great writers" you list have written anything remotely similar, so your speculations as to what they might do with the concepts are just about as hollow as you claim McCarthy's prose is.......

You've obviously never heard of or read Jos? Saramago's vastly superior Blindness. But I must warn you: it might be difficult for people who enjoy short, declarative sentences.


well, looking for humor in McCarthy is pretty pointless, he's got a pretty stark way of looking at life.

A 'stark way...'

I don't know if Beckett had a bleak perspective, since I never had a chat with the gentleman, but I know that his post-apocalyptic plays had room for bleakness and humor; one didn't cancel the other. I guess that's what separates the great from the small: the great include everything, want to express the world in all its complexity; the small restrict, narrow, reduce things to ideas as small as them.

But since we're on the subject of bleakness...

For a while I've been toying around with this theory of literary production: I call it at the moment the Inverse Misery Law . In my theory I propose that the humor in a work of literature is usually inversely proportional to the amount of misery a writer has endured in his lifetime.

Jos? Saramago lived in a totalitarian state, he writes humorous books.

Milan Kundera lived in a totalitarian state, he writes humorous books.

Ismael Kadare lived in a totalitarian state, he writes humorous books.

G?nter Grass was young enough to be drafted into the Nazi army and saw his entire country destroyed and bears its guilt on his shoulders, he writes humorous books.

Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez has cancer, once had to flee his country because he published a newspaper article that exposed the truth about a famous shipwreck case, and keeps alive the history of a country that has been ravaged by greedy foreign interests and bloody civil wars and is always on the verge of becoming a regime. He writes humorous novels.

Mikhail Bulgakov lived in a totalitarian state, couldn't even get a job in it, had to write his comical masterpiece The Master and Margarita in secrecy because its existence would be his death.

Cormac McCarthy lives in a country that overall respects the civil rights of its citizens, has had a rather decent life - father was a lawyer, college, marriage, children - had some periods of poverty because writing isn't a smart choice if you want to make a living out of it. But I hardly doubt he ever had to fear the police one day kidnapping him and erasing him from history books.

He writes bleak novels.

It needs some polishing, but what do you think of my theory?

[beelzebubbles]

You have cottoned on to one of the many truths of the universe and that is this: not everyone has a sense of humor.

[kpjayan]

By the expectation I had about this book, I wasn't disappointed greatly. However, after few pages, it become very repetitive ( one incident to another), beyond any real value. For once, I wanted the book to end.

[DB Cooper]

It was a fun book, especially for fans of dystopian lit. I wouldnt call it poorly written, but it doesnt stand up to most of McCarthy's work. It would be interesting to see what reception The Road would have received if it didnt have Cormac McCarthy's name on it.

[saliotthomas]

You have cottoned on to one of the many truths of the universe and that is this: not everyone has a sense of humor.

Janet you are a star !

[Heteronym]

You have cottoned on to one of the many truths of the universe and that is this: not everyone has a sense of humor.

Not a crime in itself, but in literature that's a major flaw. Humor is a sign of intellectual maturity; it's usually teenagers who are serious and angsty, without any good reason. A mature person can look at the worst of situations and see something humorous about, even if it's just gallows humor or nonsense. McCarthy's stoic bleakness is very much in need of being mocked, of being brought down to earth a bit. Now where are our modern Swifts?

[ferns_dad]

I… cannot… parse this.

[saliotthomas]

Now where are our modern Swifts?

After Pride and pejudice and Zombie ,sense and sensibility and sea monster, the incoming Android Karenina. (http://www.quirkclassics.com/index.php?q=quirk-classic-4) ,Why not Gullivers post apocalyptic travels ?

Wonder if they'd go for The world of Warcraft and peace .

[anchomal]

I enjoyed The Road when it was first published, thought it a pretty decent read, all things considered. It was over-rated, and McCarthy must have been as surprised as anyone at finding himself the critics' flavour of the month, or year (coming as it did seemingly in conjunction with No Country For Old Men... the film, not the book).

I do think that most people who have read hiswork agree that Blood Meridian is his best, followed by Suttree, but for whatever reason they just didn't catch on at the time. All The Pretty Horses made his name, in about 1992 or so, won him a National Book Award and gave him best seller status for the first time, after the better part of thirty years spent plodding away. And unless he comes up with a real gem in the next few years it will have meant that he was already past his peak when he made the breakthrough into the big time... (Though I suppose it would have been difficult for anyone to follow Blood Meridian with something better)

He is an interesting writer, I think, in some ways the most interesting American writer of the last fifty years, though the liberties he takes with grammar do leave me scratching my head from time to time. He seems, at least to me, to pour his ambitions into the work, and when I read him I always felt that he was striving to achieve something. His writing is frequently compared to that of Faulkner but again that is just the critics playing their games, I suppose. Faulkner at his best casts a pretty intimidating shadow but there again not all of his work touched the level of The Sound And The Fury.

As to the question of humour in McCarthy's writing, it certainly has been in evidence in the past, or more so, I think, in the past then in his recent work. Personally, I often find it a bit like watching horror films. Some of his sentences do make me smile with wonder but his imagery is at times so striking, and on occasion so truly stomach-churning, that you might find yourself laughing out of a kind of shock. Whether that counts or not, I don't know...

[ferns_dad]

After Pride and pejudice and Zombie ,sense and sensibility and sea monster, the incoming Android Karenina. (http://www.quirkclassics.com/index.php?q=quirk-classic-4) ,Why not Gullivers post apocalyptic travels ?

Wonder if they'd go for The world of Warcraft and peace .

I always wanted to see Disney versions of great works, Crime and Punishment with the little dancing axe?

[beelzebubbles]

Humor is a sign of intellectual maturity;
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Film/Pix/pictures/2008/11/04/JohnSpringerCollectionCorbis_3stooges460.jpg

Really?

I think having a sense of humor suggests nothing more than having a sense of humor. Humor can just as easily be sophomoric or mean-spirited or cheap. It's not a good in of itself nor an indicator of intelligence. A simple person may have a sense of humor and of the ridiculous and an intelligent person may be unable to grasp irony or sardonic humor. One thing really has no relation to the other.

[e joseph]

Humor is a sign of intellectual maturity;


http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Film/Pix/pictures/2008/11/04/JohnSpringerCollectionCorbis_3stooges460.jpg

Really?

I'm sure you were trying to disprove the humor as a sign of maturity idea, but this picture's actually swaying me toward Hetero's side...

[beelzebubbles]

Please elucidate.

[e joseph]

Oh, I just like the Three Stooges.
I'm easily swayed.

[Colette Jones]

Are we just getting into a personal taste issue? Surely an author does not have to include humour to write a good book. Heteronym may need humour in a book to like it though - that is a different matter.

I personally think humour in The Road would be misplaced.

[saliotthomas]

I personally think humour in The Road would be misplaced.

Dunno, imagine when they find the shelter, the father sit at the table and bang, one of chairs was trapped with a farting pillow.
Or when they find the people look in the cellars and used as food, he could have find something spiritual to tell them before runnig.

[wyndham]

This was the first book I read in 2010 and it was a bad start.

I agree, i tried to read this thing and got about half way through and enough.

What is it with modern literature anyways? Of for that matter from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Cormac Mccarthy?

Can we say subversion, subverting the higher attributes of man through trash.

Just tried to read Bolano, what trash.

Took out a book by Carlos Ruiz, crap.

In this light, even Dostoevsky was probably crap. Where is the literature that is going to uplift people, satirize these animals running things...

[wyndham]

The Road follows a father and son trying to subside in a world ravaged by an unexplained cataclysm that has killed almost all life, scorched most of the vegetation, poisoned all water and left the remaining human survivors to scavenge for the last quickly-disappearing resources left. People lead an itinerant life, always on the move, trying to stay alive one more day although there?s nothing to stay alive for, no hope, no purpose. For those luck plays a large role in finding things to keep them alive a little longer. Others have taken a more organized effort at survival and prey on other humans: cannibalism is an everyday fear for the father and son.

This was the first book I read in 2010 and it was a bad start. This was one of the worst novels I?ve read in a long time. In fact I read bad novels all the time, but the bad impression this one left me on was exacerbated by the fact that Cormac McCarthy is considered one of the best writers alive.

The prose is bad. I?ve read many people mock McCarthy?s simple prose, comparing it to the simple sentences of a kindergarten book. I don?t have a problem with simple prose. Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway excelled at it. But this is simple prose that only describes: it?s all about setting. It?s not even remarkable description, like in a 19th century naturalist novel that described a chair or wallpaper with intricate beauty. He describes things the way we see them, in all their dullness. Nothing happens inside the heads of his characters.

The prose is uniform, from start to finish. There?s a third person narrator, but the novel may as well have been narrated by the nameless man. Narration and dialogue are undistinguishable; the dialogue between the man and the boy is undistinguishable; their dialogues are undistinguishable from the other characters?. Everyone has the same voice, the style or tone never changes.

And worst of all, it?s humorless. Some will say that?s obvious, that?s the point, it?s a post-apocalyptic novel! But that?s what bothers me the most: the tone of solemnity and seriousness that infects every page, like McCarthy is passing down a pearl of wisdom to the mere mortals reading this novel. The stoicism of the characters is ridiculous. They?re not characters, they?re symbols, abstractions. This novel is not tragic. Tragedy, a much misunderstood term, involves the destruction of a character due to his own actions. Lear?s vanity, Hamlet?s indecision, etc. No, this novel is pathetic. From pathos, meaning pity, it literarily means worthy of pity. Everything is this novel is calculated to make you feel sorry for two uninteresting, flat characters. That?s the purpose of pathos, making you feel sorry for the horrible things that happen to people who don?t deserve misery. And it works, because as much as I despised it, I couldn?t help being in tears at the end when the dying man gives his farewell speech to the boy.

A tearful ending. Like in a Spielberg movie.

This novel is a farce, the seriousness of tone hides its hollowness. If a writer can?t find humor, irony or absurd in the idea of mankind being whipped out by a global cataclysm, he may as well give up being a writer. Because there?s nothing more absurd than two characters heroically trying to stay alive in a doomed world; this is the stuff of Beckett?s absurd theater. This solemn tone is well suited for the makers of cheap fiction who wallow in melodrama, but I cannot accept that a great writer can have such a narrow view of human existence. In the hands of a really great writer, like Jos? Saramago or Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez or Milan Kundera or Philip Roth, this novel would be a riot from start to finish; what wonderful observations they could make about us in these circumstances. In the hands of McCarthy, it is melodrama.


I agree, what crap. From Cervantes to Bolano, Shakespeare to Mccarthy, what crap, intended to eliminate any spirit in the population.

[ferns_dad]

I agree, i tried to read this thing and got about half way through and enough.

What is it with modern literature anyways? Of for that matter from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Cormac Mccarthy?

Can we say subversion, subverting the higher attributes of man through trash.

Just tried to read Bolano, what trash.

Took out a book by Carlos Ruiz, crap.

In this light, even Dostoevsky was probably crap. Where is the literature that is going to uplift people, satirize these animals running things...

"n'yuk, n'yuk, n'yuk" ---Curly

Eric, please translate!

[Heteronym]

Yeah, what the hell?

[saliotthomas]

I agree, what crap. From Cervantes to Bolano, Shakespeare to Mccarthy, what crap, intended to eliminate any spirit in the population.

Shit is a nice alternative to crap.
Should try it.

[Igu Soni]

By the expectation I had about this book, I wasn't disappointed greatly. However, after few pages, it become very repetitive ( one incident to another), beyond any real value. For once, I wanted the book to end.
Exactly my feeling. I left it after thirty or so pages.

[Raphael Lambach]

In the book store where I work this book is sold out since december - we're waiting for new edition with the movie shot as cover. I've watched the movie last wednesday.

[Igu Soni]

In the book store where I work this book is sold out since december - we're waiting for new edition with the movie shot as cover. I've watched the movie last wednesday.
I can never read the book after watching the movie; I don't get the point of reading the book if the role of the imagination is extinguished.

[Heteronym]

Ironically, I only read this novel because I wanted to watch the movie but not without having read the novel first. But I disliked the novel so much now I don't want to watch the movie anymore :D

[Beth]

I think The Road is a tremendous novel, not at all what it seems, neither simple, nor about the environment, nor a downer. I think it's a mandate for personal integrity in the aftermath of loss.

[Raphael Lambach]

I can never read the book after watching the movie; I don't get the point of reading the book if the role of the imagination is extinguished.

I agree, but now I'm reading it and to be honest, the book is really better than movie. I'd rather not watch the movie but I was looking forward to know the story - it's trully exciting.

[Igu Soni]

Ironically, I only read this novel because I wanted to watch the movie but not without having read the novel first. But I disliked the novel so much now I don't want to watch the movie anymore :D


I agree, but now I'm reading it and to be honest, the book is really better than movie. I'd rather not watch the movie but I was looking forward to know the story - it's trully exciting.

I haven't watched the movie yet, but I'm sure I'll like it more. Furhter elucidation at The Puzzling Road Life as it ain't (http://wp.me/pEyin-6f)

Explanation of relevant point:

All in all, however, I have higher hopes of the movie, which may be able to break free of McCarthy?s distracting obsession with his son and simultaneously bring home the reality of the world that McCarthy?s hackneyed method of description couldn?t.
About aforementioned method of description:

Notice, apart from the obvious melancholy, the number of sentence fragments in the piece. That is an obviously 'artsy' attempt at bleakness, which I don?t think generally works. It does, in this case, but this book is littered throughout with sudden onslaughts of these fragments which tend to be poetic descriptions without consideration for any narrative rhythm.

To Heteronym's original point:
I've already elucidated this in some other thread, but I honestly feel that the humour you look for in books, thanks to the Kundera crit book you read, can be replaced by human-ness. As long as it isn't completely negative in its flow. The Roadhas the relationship to help lighten the mood, which I think makes it fine on that count.

[chrisphillips]

I fall on the side of it being an absolutely terrific book. As is often the case, the film is a worthy effort, but was always going to struggle to match the book.

I keep reading that there is an adaptation of Blood Meridian in the pipeline. I liked the book, though it was a slog at times, but the film would have to go some to sufficiently captire the violence and brutality.

The Coen brothers' adaptation of the excellent No Country For Old Men novel is flawless.

Those three are the sum total of my dalliances with McCarthy. I like him a lot.

[Stiffelio]

I just finished The Road today and I'm still gasping for words to describe my emotions. I've read many disdainful comments in this thread coming from some very combative McCarthy detractors. I won't argue with them but I'm not surprised that the unanimous positive reception this book got from both critics and public might have generated such a reaction. So be it. I can only speak from my heart and from what this novel produced in me. I was shattered, devastated and I admit, with no embarassment at all, that a few pages before the ending my tears welled up over the dam and I, a grown up man, had to finish the book sobbing. Melodrama, someone claimed? Yes, melodrama, and so what! The vast majority of the nineteenth century novels were terrific melodramas.

But The Road is much more than that of course. The story is told by McCarthy with unrelenting bleakness and gives the reader a permanent sense of dispair that pushes him to, alternatively, read on and on , and then to stop and gasp for air. McCarthy is in full command of his narrative drive, in both the descriptive or 'action' sections and in the deceivingly simple dialogues between father and son. His prose style is vividly descriptive and sparse at the same time, always pristine clear. It's amazing how a writer can turn passages describing the lengths to which the man has to go to make a survival for him and the boy, like yanking open a latch from a trap door, disassembling a gas burner or stitching his own leg, and not making it all seem as a repair-man's catalogue of machinery manuals. McCarthy somehow manages to turn all that otherwise boring stuff into prose poems. The same happens when McCarthy describes the horrors the man and the boy encounter as they travel along roads, forests, swamps and beaches. He is able to extract beauty from the horrific or the grotesque. As for the dialogues in The Road, they are vintage McCarthy (and they at times reminded me a bit of Raymond Carver). I found myself backpedalling and re-reading pages of dialogue between the man and the boy, not because I'd missed something but for their sheer, simple beauty. So little said, so much meaning implied. This is what I call minimalism well understood.

McCarthy makes the reader care for these two desperate characters, making us terrified that something disastrous may happen to them. As grim and horrific as the images that jump up from the pages may seem, The Road is not so much about a post-apocalyptic distopia or a warning for what may befall us as a planet. Or at least not only that. The book is above all about survival and endurance, in any situation. I ultimately saw it as a genuine love story, between a father and a son, or from father for a son. And even beyond the heartbreaking ending I did find some glimmer of hope shining through. I recommend this novel to anybody who is a parent. And I'm sure that the book is so complex and rich in meaning that it will most likely perdure over time; it will become a topic of discussion in schools and become a classic.

[Mirabell]

I've read many disdainful comments in this thread coming from some very combative McCarthy detractors.

I don't particularly like the book, but I am not a McCarthy detractor, I am a HUGE McCarthy fan. I think he's one of the best living American writers of prose, just not lately.

[waalkwriter]

I don't particularly like the book, but I am not a McCarthy detractor, I am a HUGE McCarthy fan. I think he's one of the best living American writers of prose, just not lately.

I'd have to disagree with you...a lot. I don't buy into his minalamist style as being enormously talented. To say he is even a good writer goes totally against my inclinations, but to even put him ahead of Eggers, Vollman, Roth, Irving and Chabon as being in the top five in America, is a tad ridiculous I feel.

I've tried to read 3 of his novels, and finally been worn down to the point where I could not stomach another declarative sentence fragment for months. Blood Meridian was hackwork, a long stream of 'he did this, he did that, he stabbed a man in the stomach, he sat underneath a tree and drank whiskey snoozing while his clothes hung on the branch.' I can't, for the life of me, stomach writing like that, soulless empty writing and flat soulless characters.

All The Pretty Horses is similarly a huge disappointment. I read the first few pages and had high hopes, then it became McCarthynized, as the main character proceeded to completely bore me as an empty shell, and the writing began to read, 'he came in and sat down at the table. He took his hat off. He asked for a cup of coffee.' I was unable to get much farther.

Finally, my English teacher made one last ditch effort to try to make me like McCarthy by sending me to The Road, saying that it was an extroadinary book I couldn't possibly not like. I loved the plot, think the plot is wonderful, will probably love the movie, but again McCarthy's hackneyed writing makes me want to vomit.

[Mirabell]

I'd have to disagree with you...a lot. I don't buy into his minalamist style as being enormously talented.

At least get the descriptive part right, McCarthy is anything but a minimalist as far as his style is concerned. He uses a rich and complex language, utilizing a vast vocabulary that engages a historical dimension within language, something very few writers are able to pull of with such aplomb.

[chrisphillips]

They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.


A randomly selected exceprt from Blood Meridian. Surely this cannot reflect a a minimalist style...

[Mirabell]

A randomly selected exceprt from Blood Meridian. Surely this cannot reflect a a minimalist style...

exactly. s what I was saying.

[Igu Soni]

At least get the descriptive part right, McCarthy is anything but a minimalist as far as his style is concerned. He uses a rich and complex language, utilizing a vast vocabulary that engages a historical dimension within language, something very few writers are able to pull off with such aplomb.
Can you expound on the 'historical dimension'? It sounds interesting but I don't understand the idea.

[Galatea92]

They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

God, that's awful. I don't think I'll be reading Cormac McCarthy very soon if that's an example of his style.

[Igu Soni]

God, that's awful. I don't think I'll be reading Cormac McCarthy very soon if that's an example of his style.
It's better if you're in the book. I had a massive problem with McCarthy using sentence fragments to dexcribe his world. While they were annoying everywhere, they were somewhat less so when they came in the middle of a reading block.

[chrisphillips]

What did people make of No Country For Old Men? Its plot is much more down the line of a more conventional thriller, with a stolen loot, a villain, a police effort and a hitman.

I just wonder if some of those who don't like the aspect of McCarthy demonstrated in the Blood Meridian excerpt quoted above may find it more palatable.

These two, along with The Road, are the three of his I've read and Blood Meridian has the densest, least accessible prose of them all, especially in relation to descriptions of the landscapes and the like. In fact, if I wanted to convert someone to McCarthy I'd probably give them No Country For Old Men.

[Mirabell]

First paragraph of Suttree


Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun. A hand trails over the gunwale and he lies athwart the skiff, the toe of one sneaker plucking periodic dimples in the river with the boat's slight cradling, drifting down beneath the bridge and slowly past the mudstained stanchions. Under the high cool arches and dark keeps of the span's undercarriage where pigeons babble and the hollow flap of their wings echoes in stark applause. Glancing up at these cathedraled vaultings with their fossil woodknots and pseudomorphic nailheads in gray concrete, drifting, the bridge's slant shadow leaning the width of the river with that headlong illusion postulate in old cupracers frozen on photoplates, their wheels elliptic with speed. These shadows form over the skiff, accommodate his prone figure and pass on.

[Galatea92]

First paragraph of Suttree

Oh, please, no, stop it, I can't stand any more :eek:.

[Liam]

God, that's awful. I don't think I'll be reading Cormac McCarthy very soon if that's an example of his style.
I agree with Galatea. Usually, I'm a sucker for luscious (sometimes even flowery) language, but really, this is stylistic overkill.

"Cathedraled vaultings," WTF??? Why not "monasteried hedgewalls"?

[Bubba]

At least get the descriptive part right, McCarthy is anything but a minimalist as far as his style is concerned. He uses a rich and complex language, utilizing a vast vocabulary that engages a historical dimension within language, something very few writers are able to pull of with such aplomb.


A randomly selected exceprt from Blood Meridian. Surely this cannot reflect a a minimalist style...

Ugh. No wonder I couldn't finish Blood Meridian. In addition to everything else that's atrocious about that passage, there are the similes. I'll give the writer of contemporary prose an allowance of about three similes total before I toss his book at the wall. Here, in barely five lines, McCarthy manages to toss off three--three!--and two of them in one sentence, no less.

I would submit that McCarthy's prose is characterized by both bloat and minimalism. Each sentence is overloaded, but the structure of the sentences is unvarying. McCarthy's characters--at least in the books I've read--from All the Pretty Horses to The Crossing, at which point I could stomach no more--are never more than ciphers; any psychology is minimal. See if, even at the end of The Crossing, you can keep "Billy" and "Boyd," the two main characters, straight. Any humor (humor that's not inadvertent, that is) in the McCarthy books I've read is also minimal (I hear tell the Tennessee books are funny, but I'm not to going to be reading them to find out).

I suspect B. R. Myers, whom Mirabell cannot suffer, was on to something when he accused McCarthy--or, more properly, McCarthy's champions in the literary press--of fraud. And yet I think McCarthy can tell a good story; it may be that he dresses up his prose because he fears being taken for a Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, or other author of dime-store cowboy novels. What so many writers seem not to understand is that writing honest entertainments after the manner of Louis L'Amour is a far nobler calling--and usually no less lucrative--than hoodwinking hacks like Harold Bloom and the third-rate scribblers who write in the books pages of the papers and magazines.

[Daniel del Real]

I've only read two McCarthy's book and in translation, so I'm not the most prepared voice in here to speak about his writing style.
What I highlight and admire from McCarthy's prose is the ability he has to dissect and analyse evil. The violence he always portrays in his stories is there for a reason; it is a consequence of the attitudes and way of living of his characters and the geographical territory they occupy. He's able to reflect the violence in the border and the thirst for blood of the desert in the northern states of Mexico. The atrocity, the horror, the unspeakeable in the words of a writer that speaks out things as they are, terrible and full of hate.
Ironically the best writers describing the reality of the Mexican northern frontier aren't Mexican. Roberto Bola?o is one of them and McCarthy for sure is the other one.

[e joseph]

Anyone (speaking to Blood Meridian/Suttree advocates here) read Outer Dark? It doesn't bludgeon like Blood Meridian, but I definitely think it could appeal to the same audience.

[waalkwriter]

Ugh. No wonder I couldn't finish Blood Meridian. In addition to everything else that's atrocious about that passage, there are the similes. I'll give the writer of contemporary prose an allowance of about three similes total before I toss his book at the wall. Here, in barely five lines, McCarthy manages to toss off three--three!--and two of them in one sentence, no less.

I would submit that McCarthy's prose is characterized by both bloat and minimalism. Each sentence is overloaded, but the structure of the sentences is unvarying. McCarthy's characters--at least in the books I've read--from All the Pretty Horses to The Crossing, at which point I could stomach no more--are never more than ciphers; any psychology is minimal. See if, even at the end of The Crossing, you can keep "Billy" and "Boyd," the two main characters, straight. Any humor (humor that's not inadvertent, that is) in the McCarthy books I've read is also minimal (I hear tell the Tennessee books are funny, but I'm not to going to be reading them to find out).

I suspect B. R. Myers, whom Mirabell cannot suffer, was on to something when he accused McCarthy--or, more properly, McCarthy's champions in the literary press--of fraud. And yet I think McCarthy can tell a good story; it may be that he dresses up his prose because he fears being taken for a Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour, or other author of dime-store cowboy novels. What so many writers seem not to understand is that writing honest entertainments after the manner of Louis L'Amour is a far nobler calling--and usually no less lucrative--than hoodwinking hacks like Harold Bloom and the third-rate scribblers who write in the books pages of the papers and magazines.

You hit it quite well. He is minimalist in that almost every single one of those sentences is a declarative sentence. I HATE!!! declarative sentences with a passion that makes the fires of hell seem like the frozen wasteland of Antarctica, that makes my hatred of post-modernism seem like a deep and passionate love.

But at the same time as he's bashing the reader over the head with these long streams of monotonous, blunt declarative sentences, he's throwing in long streams of similes and stylistic overkill on description.

You also hit another nail on the head; hardly any of his characters have any personality, any at all, we aren't even allowed the glorifying satisfaction of seeing someone human and complex desensitized by the violence around him, even in a story perfectly set up for it like Blood Meridian. I can't stand bad character work almost as much as I can't stand declarative sentences. If you aren't going to explore humanity in highly developed, human characters, why the hell are you writing fiction? McCarthy is basically using chump characters from dime store Westerns, and inflating them with his prose. Some cannot understand what I dislike about The Road, it's that the actual writing contains not a trace of the love between the father and son, the writing is always too removed from the actual passions, and therefore his stories always inhabit a soulless plane of existence I care nothing about traveling to.

And yes, Louis L'Amour is a far better and more nobler writer than McCarthy, he was an honest writer, and one who knew that fundamentally he was trying to write stories to explore the individual characters, their development, and tell a story that was enough to help people forget about their real world grievances. McCarthy takes himself far too seriously, almost as badly as DeLillo and he's almost as much of cliche. He seriously said in an interview that the only point of "art" was life and death and that if the art wasn't about life or death then it wasn't true art.

Don't even get me started on the bloated, pompous windbag of the literary establishment that is Harold Bloom, nearly everything he's written not about the Romantic Period has earned him, my eternal undying disgust and dislike, not the least of which was his unimaginably arrogant dismissal of J.K. Rowling and the statement that "She's doing a good thing by getting young children into reading," when in fact it was what got me into reading, and my brothers, and at least a dozen people I know in my own limited background, and for him to stand there and make such an inaccurate, self-righteous statement in his sheer snobbery, it just, it just...oooh I cannot even find the words to describe the kind of anger that sort of condescending behavior makes me feel.

I try to just avoid Bloom these days because I'm afraid I might read something praising something that I also like, and will probably then be unable to continue liking.

So back to McCarthy briefly, you guys, mirabel and whoever linked, seem to be missing my point. I wasn't saying he was a traditional Hemingway minimalist, but he is one, his tendency to use declarative sentences is pretty much the hallmark of minimalism, and his lack of character work in favor of plot focus is as well, and both those things just on some fundamental level piss me off as a reader. As I've said before, and am quite serious, I actually do get headaches after reading declarative sentences in long streams of fiction writing; for instance the first time I read part of his worst book, Blood Meridian, I had to stop and literally go take an aspirin, its just a tick that literally drives me crazy.

People keep gloating over and glorifying the beauty of his expression; I don't care, it's written in declarative sentences and I can't get over that no matter if it was Faulkneresque. But it's not, McCarthy simply piles on huge numbers of similes and overwrought, flowery imagery, and thinks he's being clever. Enough is enough. I'm quite partisan about some things in literature unfortunately; if I really disdain or dislike a writer, I fundamentally believe that others need to too, I do have a drive to sort of argue out an ubermeinung, otherwise why think, why have an opinion at all if it's never worth something, because the only way it attains value is by changing the opinions of others; that's its sole purpose. So that is why I devote most of my effort to tearing down certain writers and styles I dislike; it's the only thing I find worthwhile enough to devote the energy and time into doing.

[saliotthomas]

Coming from a guy who think Chabon and Irving are among the finest americain writer, it sure is fine.
And don't mistake what is say, i do like Ivirng sometime and well, of Chabon, i have not read the best(Gentlemen of the road and manhood for Amateur were unlucky choices...)
On the other hand, the expert/blaz? attitude of some here with total disrespect for the taste of others is quite depressing, specialy when it come from the ones who come up with so few new discoveries or their own reading.
Their only enthousiasm aim at negative critic and certitudes, pompous bitterness sweating in most of their post.

[e joseph]

I devote most of my effort to tearing down certain writers and styles I dislike; it's the only thing I find worthwhile enough to devote the energy and time into doing.
You, my friend, have just distilled for me what it is that frustrates me on this forum. Thanks!

[e joseph]

Aww, Saliotthomas, you beat me to it and did a better job expressing your thoughts. And yes, depressing indeed.

[saliotthomas]

Thanks Joseph

Poodles.....

And a last thing, Mirabel made me discovered many books and authors which is one of the raison i hangout here. His taste are eclectic and various and by reviewing and deffending authors he exposes himself to many attack and critic of those little fury barking animals.

[Colette Jones]

...if I really disdain or dislike a writer, I fundamentally believe that others need to too, I do have a drive to sort of argue out an ubermeinung, otherwise why think, why have an opinion at all if it's never worth something, because the only way it attains value is by changing the opinions of others; that's its sole purpose. So that is why I devote most of my effort to tearing down certain writers and styles I dislike; it's the only thing I find worthwhile enough to devote the energy and time into doing.
That's the most ridiculous outlook to literature I have ever heard. Even the most opinionated members of this forum would agree I'm sure.

Are you a troll?

[Igu Soni]

While I wouldn't like to contribute to any sort of person-bashing, maybe the people involved here should give the discussion a hand here (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/general-chat/30128-opinions-important-independent-their-use-persuasion.html).

[Liam]

Are you a troll?

I thought trolls only existed in storybooks and legends, :).



http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/_files_troll_2.jpg



I think Waalkwriter is merely venting his youthful exuberance here. I used to be like that too ("used" to be, you say???).



Give him a coupl'a'more years; children DO grow up, eventually. I mean, Look at me! :p



L.

[Colette Jones]

I think Waalkwriter is merely venting his youthful exuberance here. I used to be like that too ("used" to be, you say???).I don't believe that, Liam. You might have been opinionated, but to think that you should be trying to force other people to adhere to your opinion? That's ridiculous and not something I think you would have done.

Give him a coupl'a'more years; children DO grow up, eventually. I mean, Look at me! :p

This board is being destroyed by too much tolerance of ridiculous posturing. I know, I know, I can leave... and I pretty much have, like many other people... there's not much of interest going on.

[waalkwriter]

I just have a temper. Like i said, hanging onto anger/fundamentalist devotion to a the universal truth of an opinion is just about the only way I can prevent myself from sliding into utter apathetic nihlism, so until I find another way. Not to say I don't change my opinions, I just believe in arguing until someone comes up with a better argument.

Which isn't to say that post wasn't too harsh, how harsh I am depends really on what mood I'm in, which is merely human.

As for "collette bottle" I never said anything about forcing people into my opinion, I was talking about the idea of arguing people into my opinion, there is a very big difference, really, between the two. It's also the reason I can't stand politics anymore; when you destroy someone in an argument over their politics, they should convert to your view because they cannot defend there's, the strain of OCD in me cannot understand why they would simply qualify and say they have a right to hold whatever opinion they want, even if it's wrong. Though issues of taste are of course not so easily solved because they cannot be dealt with through matters of logic, but they can still be debated.

Saliothomas, that was not even directed at mirabel. People often make the mistake that when I'm angry in an argument I am actually directing it personally, no such thing. There is a distinction for me between the person and the views, and regardless I was not even directing my argument at mirabel, only small portions criticizing his distinction of McCarthy as not a minimalist. I don't mean to convey any snobbery or pomposity, in fact it is one of the main things I reject in most of modern American literature: in fact the sole reason I don't really care much for Don DeLillo is that he is altogether too snobby, to the point of literary cliche. And I would not criticize Mirabel's taste or opinion in general, I have found him extremely helpful and enlightening on various German authors, as well as on Go Tell It On The Mountain and various other subjects he has written about.

And to touch on Liam's statement, that is really what it is the sort of makes me get so over the top in arguments like this. I'm not going to lie and say I don't have a tremendous temper that is quickly overwrought in even the most seemingly mundane debate, but a major reason I am so passionate about some of these subjects, post-modernism and McCarthy, is because I have grown sick and tired of being simply dismissed, of having my opinions simply dismissed as "youthful exuberance" no matter how mildly I put them, no matter how eloquently I try to put them, or the like. It is so annoying, as someone who believes in fair argument on opinions and taste, to be told over and over again, merely dismissed, "Ah, you're just too young to appreciate McCarthy" when it has nothing to do with age. So yes, I retain bitter feelings about past debates on these issues and sometimes those come out in current arguments.

I haven't dismissed McCarthy as art or literature, I just have stated that it bothers me a lot how overblown his reputation is. The fact is what he does is really not that hard, his minimalist style of structurally similar declarative sentences is not that hard to manipulate, I could do it if for some reason I lost my sanity and decided I wanted to do nothing but that. I give myself and an ordinary writer room for no more than one or two declarative sentences per page at best because I think they are one of the sloppiest things a writer can do, and I often go back and change large numbers of sentences if I even think they are getting too close to being repetitively direct.

Even his type of description is not hard. There is more to literature than saying something that sounds profound, there is plot, there is story, there is character, most of all there is character, character is the only thing, the absolute only thing it needs to contain because it's the reason we're writers and not biographers of the migration patterns of humpback whales, it is why a person who wants to read a work of fiction buys a work of fiction, and McCarthy's characters are these poorly developed sort lifeless collections of words on a page. so yes, maybe the biggest thing of all, the real reason I get vitriolic at times, is that I can't stand it that McCarthy has so much faux popularity, a great deal of it because he is a trendy "literary" writer of the American literary establishment and nothing more.

Also, please don't talk down to me like I'm an idiot. Partisan beyond reason, yes, but that is far more favorable to me than being a nihilist, which are personally the only two options and I phase in and out of both, like the tides. Either what you believe is universally true until someone defeats it in a debate or creates a debate where two opposing opinions are both perfectly valid, or what you believe isn't, in which case personally I can no longer find any will or reason to believe anything at all and instead get really nihilistic, in a way I don't care for, I don't care for the passionless way it makes me feel, so I try to stay like this, in the very least I do much better writing.

[Colette Jones]

Too many people are using WLF to air their personal issues rather than talk about books. It's BORING! Anyone who comes to this thread wondering what people think of Cormac McCarthy is going to get what Mirabell labeled a "wtf" feeling. Unfortunately, it's everywhere on this board. Waalkwriter, the more you explain why you argue the way you do, the deeper you dig your hole. Unfortunately you are not the only destroyer of the board, or I could just ignore you.

[anchomal]

[QUOTE=waalkwriter;59208]I give myself and an ordinary writer room for no more than one or two declarative sentences per page at best because I think they are one of the sloppiest things a writer can do...QUOTE]


I'm sorry but I just don't get this. Since when did the declarative sentence become a bad thing? Isn't this surely the truest form of sentence, and isn't it in large part what made Hemingway's short stories so great?

[Colette Jones]

I give myself and an ordinary writer room for no more than one or two declarative sentences per page at best because I think they are one of the sloppiest things a writer can do...


I'm sorry but I just don't get this. Since when did the declarative sentence become a bad thing? Isn't this surely the truest form of sentence, and isn't it in large part what made Hemingway's short stories so great?
anchomel, it doesn't work to discuss things with waalkwriter. He just redefines things. Like "minimalist" now includes using too many declarative sentences (because it was shown that McCarthy is not in the least bit minimalist - waalkwriter redefines the term, because he cannot be wrong, you see).

[Bubba]

I don't believe that, Liam. You might have been opinionated, but to think that you should be trying to force other people to adhere to your opinion? That's ridiculous and not something I think you would have done.

This board is being destroyed by too much tolerance of ridiculous posturing. I know, I know, I can leave... and I pretty much have, like many other people... there's not much of interest going on.

I can't for the life of me, Colette, figure out why you should object so strongly to the posts by Waalkwriter and by other detractors--including, presumably, yours truly--of McCarthy's work. I've looked over the posts in this thread and confirmed that most of those who dislike his work give thoughtful and even interesting reasons for their dislike. Which is more than can be said for most of the posters who are praising it. Nor are the detractors attacking the admirers--except perhaps for that purveyor of hyperbolic blurbs Harold Bloom.

I, for one, enjoy the "unsettledness" of McCarthy's books (the protagonists actually cross into "Old Mexico" and travel there, unlike the protagonists of so many of the "heist" books I read when I was younger, who always planned to go when they pulled off the job, but, to my disappointment, never actually did), but the total humorlessness of his more recent books makes them unpalatable.


I just have a temper. Like i said, hanging onto anger/fundamentalist devotion to a the universal truth of an opinion is just about the only way I can prevent myself from sliding into utter apathetic nihlism, so until I find another way. Not to say I don't change my opinions, I just believe in arguing until someone comes up with a better argument.

Which isn't to say that post wasn't too harsh, how harsh I am depends really on what mood I'm in, which is merely human.

As for "collette bottle" I never said anything about forcing people into my opinion, I was talking about the idea of arguing people into my opinion, there is a very big difference, really, between the two. It's also the reason I can't stand politics anymore; when you destroy someone in an argument over their politics, they should convert to your view because they cannot defend there's, the strain of OCD in me cannot understand why they would simply qualify and say they have a right to hold whatever opinion they want, even if it's wrong. Though issues of taste are of course not so easily solved because they cannot be dealt with through matters of logic, but they can still be debated.

Saliothomas, that was not even directed at mirabel. People often make the mistake that when I'm angry in an argument I am actually directing it personally, no such thing. There is a distinction for me between the person and the views, and regardless I was not even directing my argument at mirabel, only small portions criticizing his distinction of McCarthy as not a minimalist. I don't mean to convey any snobbery or pomposity, in fact it is one of the main things I reject in most of modern American literature: in fact the sole reason I don't really care much for Don DeLillo is that he is altogether too snobby, to the point of literary cliche. And I would not criticize Mirabel's taste or opinion in general, I have found him extremely helpful and enlightening on various German authors, as well as on Go Tell It On The Mountain and various other subjects he has written about.

And to touch on Liam's statement, that is really what it is the sort of makes me get so over the top in arguments like this. I'm not going to lie and say I don't have a tremendous temper that is quickly overwrought in even the most seemingly mundane debate, but a major reason I am so passionate about some of these subjects, post-modernism and McCarthy, is because I have grown sick and tired of being simply dismissed, of having my opinions simply dismissed as "youthful exuberance" no matter how mildly I put them, no matter how eloquently I try to put them, or the like. It is so annoying, as someone who believes in fair argument on opinions and taste, to be told over and over again, merely dismissed, "Ah, you're just too young to appreciate McCarthy" when it has nothing to do with age.

Also, please don't talk down to me like I'm an idiot. Partisan beyond reason, yes, but that is far more favorable to me than being a nihilist, which are personally the only two options and I phase in and out of both, like the tides. Either what you believe is universally true until someone defeats it in a debate or creates a debate where two opposing opinions are both perfectly valid, or what you believe isn't, in which case personally I can no longer find any will or reason to believe anything at all and instead get really nihilistic, in a way I don't care for, I don't care for the passionless way it makes me feel, so I try to stay like this, in the very least I do much better writing.

Waalkwriter, whose critique of McCarthy's work and its reception strikes me as reasonable, should perhaps be advised that his understandable objections to the inevitable but probably well meaning condescension with which he has been addressed here and elsewhere would carry more force had he himself not alluded, in other threads, to his tender years (he who lives by the sword, etc.). Until he has grown out of short pants, he may do well to suffer such condescension in silence.

Colette also notes that many of the above posts are "BORING." What I would find "boring" (no need for visual bombast, Colette) is a board full of McCarthyites convinced their man can write no wrong. And, until now, I don't think I've read any of Colette's 300-odd posts with any real interest. Nor do I log onto a literature board to gaze on gigantic pictures of trolls. Yet I would never intimate that such posts are contributing to the destruction of the board!

I would suggest that the McCarthyites read a good novel by, say, Larry McMurtry, ask themselves whose work they really prefer, and answer themselves honestly, if they can.

[Colette Jones]

Bubba, my comments were not about those who have written in this thread, McCarthy detractors or not. I responded to something waalkwriter said which I think is ridiculous and it became even more ridiculous when he explained it. And about what's boring, here's what I said, please don't take it out of context:

Too many people are using WLF to air their personal issues rather than talk about books. It's BORING!
Oh, and I didn't insert the picture of the troll either.

[saliotthomas]

Actually i was waiting for the segond baz? bitter poddle to manifest himself.

Done.

[waalkwriter]

anchomel, it doesn't work to discuss things with waalkwriter. He just redefines things. Like "minimalist" now includes using too many declarative sentences (because it was shown that McCarthy is not in the least bit minimalist - waalkwriter redefines the term, because he cannot be wrong, you see).

You know you can find hundreds of online articles solely discussing the minimalist aspect of McCarthy's writing? I could give you 20 pages of quotes if I thought it would make a difference.


The Road by Cormac McCarthy runs beyond minimalism. Where minimalism stops, McCarthy continues on and on to take things away from you.


Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, which follows his radically minimalist postmodern Western, No Country for Old Men, is a brilliant evocation of what the ...


Jun 18, 2007 ... and Pulitzer Prize ? McCarthy's instincts are purely minimalist, ... And there are two things you always know about a Cormac McCarthy ..

I've never had anyone, not even fans of McCarthy, argue with me over the point that he is not basically a minimalist writer who uses an overwrought flowery prose drenched in his stylism, but still basically minimalist. He does not delve into the personal psychology of his characters deeply, (The Man With No Name had more of a personality than any of his characters that I've read), he tends to keep a basic sentence structure running throughout large chunks of his work, and he uses almost nothing but declarative sentences, these are all basic hallmarks of classic minimalism.

Achomel, I don't like Hemingway much either. I can stand to read him though, unlike McCarthy because at least Hemingway's writing didn't come off as someone too full of himself. The Old Man and The Sea was a profound disappointment to me due to the lack of personal character work in it that I felt it needed, A Farewell to Arms was okay, never finished The Sun Also Rises, and the only short story I read was "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and I didn't particularly care for it much. I do not consider declarative sentences to be the purest form of writing either, I consider them to be the weakest form, the laziest form, the easiest and least nuanced form to work with as a writer and I find them dull, monotonous and repetitive as a reader. I've never found heavy use of them to add any extensive beauty to a story.

Back to you Colette, I think you have disrespected me. Not by being condescending and attacking me, but by not taking the time to read what I have already written carefully because you make such a dumb and inaccurate statement like, "Because you see he can't be wrong" which is completely the opposite of what I said. I said if I believe something, I believe it, if I didn't think it was the strongest, arguable universal opinion, I would find that opinion, how I find those opinions is through debate. Its not a matter of not being wrong, its a matter of believing in debate, debate which I might occasionally get too steamed up with, mostly because of running into people like you in the past, who, unlike me, when presented with a viewpoint you disagree with simple condescend it and dismiss it; I never dismiss a viewpoint or opinion, I always give it the respect of a thorough debate if I have a view on it.

But you know I find it rather funny, rather odd, that you are criticizing me for "destroying the board" when I'm only discussing a literary viewpoint, you are the only one here attacking fellow users. I have not attacked any user, I have not condescended any user, and I won't, I believe in such distinctions and respects.

As for airing personal issues? Not at all. It is however important sometimes for people to understand where you are coming from in order to appreciate what you are saying, it seemed very obviously that an such an explanation was required here so I provided it.

So please do not condescend me any further, as if I am some weird idiot for having an intense dislike of McCarthy. I don't like it as a writer or a reader, as I've said very clearly and explained why. If you want to argue the merits of declarative sentences with me, or argue whether McCarthy is a minimalist, do so, but quit the holier than thou personal attacks.

[Colette Jones]

It's not about your dislike of McCarthy. It's about the following, which is what I quoted originally, and what I find ridiculous. I have added some bold to show exactly what I think is ridiculous and the kind of attitude that destroys good forums.

if I really disdain or dislike a writer, I fundamentally believe that others need to too, I do have a drive to sort of argue out an ubermeinung, otherwise why think, why have an opinion at all if it's never worth something, because the only way it attains value is by changing the opinions of others; that's its sole purpose. So that is why I devote most of my effort to tearing down certain writers and styles I dislike; it's the only thing I find worthwhile enough to devote the energy and time into doing.

[Bubba]

Actually i was waiting for the segond baz? bitter poddle to manifest himself.

Done.

Thomas, I must say I'm not very sure what a "segond bitter baz? poddle" might be. It doesn't sound very flattering, though. Still, it made laugh.

[waalkwriter]

Well that might come off as a bit fascist, but it's one way to explain it. perhps I said it better in iqu's thread.

Regardless, I'd like to know more about where you're coming from with this, "McCarthy is not a minimalist" argument.

[Colette Jones]

I'm not in that argument. I have only read The Road. I quite liked it but not as much as a lot of people did. I saw you call McCarthy minimalist and Mirabell and chrisphilips point out that he's not. You are adamant that he is, but you've explained why you argue your opinions so adamantly, and I think it's a ridiculous stance, so I tend to believe that Mirabell and chrisphillips know what they're talking about more than you do.

[Liam]

I saw you call McCarthy minimalist and Mirabell and chrisphilips point out that he's not.
Seeing how he piles on adjective upon adjective (in the samples provided), I'd call him a maximalist, myself. Such overwrought emotion!

[DouglasM]

So, back to the thread...

I'm halfway through it. Somethings I agree with Heteronym, somethings I don't.

I do not consider humour a necessary, essential, indispensable part of fine literature. However, it is welcome sometimes. Not in this case. Personally I think the hermetic tone fits well the atmosphere intended, which I believe is to create, as has already been said, a bleak view of a close future where some unknown catastrophe may cause all hope to be torn asunder.

At first, the constant repetition of their day-by-day quest for nothing was tedious. Then I noticed it represents a total lack of faith, meaning... They just go on, wherever the road leads them, without a proper reason, but it's better than staying at the same place and die eaten by cannibals.

I'd give it three stars, out of five. It's not a bad book, just far from great. The lack of happenings, the narrative and the boresome repetitions made it a pretty average book.

[Bottle Rocket]

ATTENTION: OPINION ALERT!!

I have to say, I can't be bothered to wade through the endless and to my mind unnecessary heapishly enheaped heaps of high baroquality, piled and architeconically ensorcelled into majestically instabilious towers of barbarian-burbled buzzings like the bees so lately and apocalyptically envacated (dare we anxiously whimper our abandonment issue lest never a chrysanthemum again rear its nappy-head nor a rose of Sharon evermore redole our mucousally-slimated probosces with sense-sensual memories of the lethe-drowned lotos-eaten al fresco glories of bygone, brainforgotten, eidetically-unreliable, gastro-prionated coprophagic regurgitations. BANG! echoes the sharp report of a book striking the side table with a force adequate to kill two kittens, a lemming, and a weak-minded reader or three.

De gustibus non disputandum, yes? However, I encourage you all to go back to the passage(s) cited in posts #51, 54, and 57 and look up "myriad."

"Myriad" is one of those tell-tale words -- anyone who writes "a myriad of" as McCarthy does here is betraying his reliance on a (not very well-annotated) thesaurus. He's reaching for a pretentious phrase which doesn't come naturally. Petty of me? I suppose. Revealing of him? More than enough for me.

/RANT


:) BRocket :)

[Mirabell]

anyone who writes "a myriad of" as McCarthy does here is betraying his reliance on a (not very well-annotated) thesaurus.

see? we need more people who say things that are flat-out incorrect, so that we can stop bothering with that. The above, for example.

In my (possibly pretentious) writing I use that phrase a lot and I have never owned nor borrowed or just used a thesaurus. I know you may not mean this sentence literally, but if its meant metaphorically it's just trivial, no? Not sure which is better.

[Galatea92]

"Myriad" is one of those tell-tale words -- anyone who writes "a myriad of" as McCarthy does here is betraying his reliance on a (not very well-annotated) thesaurus. He's reaching for a pretentious phrase which doesn't come naturally. Petty of me? I suppose. Revealing of him? More than enough for me.


I must admit, I'm a bit puzzled by this. Everyone uses the word "myriad", and the phrase "a myriad of". If anything, it's clich?d rather than pretentious.

[Igu Soni]

see? we need more people who say things that are flat-out incorrect, so that we can stop bothering with that. The above, for example.

In my (possibly pretentious) writing I use that phrase a lot and I have never owned nor borrowed or just used a thesaurus. I know you may not mean this sentence literally, but if its meant metaphorically it's just trivial, no? Not sure which is better.


I must admit, I'm a bit puzzled by this. Everyone uses the word "myriad", and the phrase "a myriad of". If anything, it's clich?d rather than pretentious.

What I think BRocket was trying to get at here was that someone who has McCarthy's annoyingly large vocabulary (I found it annoying in The Road though I wouldn't in most other books) should be alert to these basic mistakes. I would agree, if that were the case.
Or maybe he (BRocket) just made a mistake.

[Bubba]

I must admit, I'm a bit puzzled by this. Everyone uses the word "myriad", and the phrase "a myriad of". If anything, it's clich?d rather than pretentious.

Now, I speak without going to my dictionary, but "everyone," I believe, is plain wrong.

If I recall correctly "myriad" is an adjective, not a noun. So you could say, for example: "myriad reasons not to read McCarthy."

In Bottle Rocket's bit above, I noticed one McCarthyite word: brainforgotten.

[Igu Soni]

Is it possible to express an opinion in a tone of equanimity?
And without shoving it down the rest of our throats over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again?

[Colette Jones]

From Merriam-Webster. Maybe they're wrong. But hey, I found it on the internet, and waalkwriter, well, he found that McCarthy is minimalist on the internet, so it's got to be true. Hm, but then I have used the word myriad this way, and I don't believe everything I read on the internet, so maybe I'm the one who's wrong. Oh, I'm just getting so confused. I hate it when this happens. I must talk to my psychiatrist about it as soon as I can. Or maybe we can talk about it here on this board. It seems like a good place and you're all my friends right? We can have a pseudo self-help group. Whaddya say?

Main Entry: 1myr?i?ad
Pronunciation: \ˈmir-ē-əd\
Function: noun
Etymology: Greek myriad-, myrias, from myrioi countless, ten thousand
Date: 1555
1 : ten thousand
2 : a great number <a myriad of ideas>
usage Recent criticism of the use of myriad as a noun, both in the plural form myriads and in the phrase a myriad of, seems to reflect a mistaken belief that the word was originally and is still properly only an adjective. As the entries here show, however, the noun is in fact the older form, dating to the 16th century. The noun myriad has appeared in the works of such writers as Milton (plural myriads) and Thoreau (a myriad of), and it continues to occur frequently in reputable English. There is no reason to avoid it.

[Galatea92]

Now, I speak without going to my dictionary, but "everyone," I believe, is plain wrong.

If I recall correctly "myriad" is an adjective, not a noun. So you could say, for example: "myriad reasons not to read McCarthy."

In Bottle Rocket's bit above, I noticed one McCarthyite word: brainforgotten.

The problem with being pedantic is that you leave yourself open to a lot of gleeful hand-rubbing when you get things wrong. See Colette's post on the word 'myriad'.

I understand that you and bottlerocket both work as editors, so it's part of your job to be very particular about the use of words. But sometimes these rules about usage are nothing more than old wives tales - a little bit of investigation shows that they often don't have any basis at all.

My original puzzlement over bottlerocket's post, though, wasn't over the word and its correct usage, but over his suggestion that use of the phrase "a myriad of" was pretentious. I couldn't understand how use of a phrase that was so common could be considered pretentious.

[saliotthomas]

"I once knew a girl called Myriad and she sure looked good.
I would have loved a myriad of her but one was already too much."

[Bubba]

see? we need more people who say things that are flat-out incorrect, so that we can stop bothering with that. The above, for example.

In my (possibly pretentious) writing I use that phrase a lot and I have never owned nor borrowed or just used a thesaurus. I know you may not mean this sentence literally, but if its meant metaphorically it's just trivial, no? Not sure which is better.

In the writing of a non-native speaker, even one of near-native fluency, the use of a "a myriad of" can perhaps be forgiven, but in the writing of a man who has been anointed the indisputable master of English prose and apparently takes his role seriously it is--even if grammatically correct, as Colette's post shows--inexcusable.


The problem with being pedantic is that you leave yourself open to a lot of gleeful hand-rubbing when you get things wrong. See Colette's post on the word 'myriad'.

I understand that you and bottlerocket both work as editors, so it's part of your job to be very particular about the use of words. But sometimes these rules about usage are nothing more than old wives tales - a little bit of investigation shows that they often don't have any basis at all.

I'm willing to admit I'm wrong about "myriad," Galatea; as you say, however, and as Bottle Rocket suggests, it is clich?, but not the kind of clich? that one uses unthinkingly. It is used deliberately, self-consciously, as if the writer were consulting a thesaurus. Of the writer it says: "my prose is artistic, and I am an artiste!"

The prose I edit at my job isn't written by people likely to use "a myriad of," but if ever I did come across the phrase I would have no qualms whatsoever about editing it right out of existence, without even querying the author.

If I'm not mistaken, Faulkner was fond of "myriad," but he always used it as an adjective.



From Merriam-Webster. Maybe they're wrong. But hey, I found it on the internet, and waalkwriter, well, he found that McCarthy is minimalist on the internet, so it's got to be true. Hm, but then I have used the word myriad this way, and I don't believe everything I read on the internet, so maybe I'm the one who's wrong. Oh, I'm just getting so confused. I hate it when this happens. I must talk to my psychiatrist about it as soon as I can. Or maybe we can talk about it here on this board. It seems like a good place and you're all my friends right? We can have a pseudo self-help group. Whaddya say?



You've lost me here, Colette.

[waalkwriter]

Seeing how he piles on adjective upon adjective (in the samples provided), I'd call him a maximalist, myself. :) Such overwrought emotion!


L.


Please, understand me, I'm defining McCarthy as a minimalist in the sense of his character work, and most importantly his sentence structure. I do know what I'm talking about and the vast majority of critical opinion is that McCarthy is kind of a descriptive, overwrought, verbose minimalist. He's a sort of neo-minimalist in a sense, and not at all one in the traditional Hemingway stance, but still, you can't get over the fact that when you look at it, that's what forms the core of his writing; he merely adds Faulkneresque trappings around it.

Now, Collette, if you want me to discuss it with you further, I can start extensively quoting critical works on McCarthy. Just because I disagree with you you shouldn't automatically assume I don't know what I'm talking about, or at the very least you should put more effort into forming an argument to show that I don't know what I'm talking about, instead of just flat saying i can't possibly know as much as mirabel and since he disagrees I'm wrong. Won't lie that my knowledge cannot possibly equal his, but I have a pretty good basis to this issue. Even the people who have recommended McCarthy to me use the term "minimalist writer" 90% of the time, and I've already extensively defined, three times, how he is one, different than Hemingway yes, but still minimalist.

Like I said elsewhere, not to give the wrong impression, I believe most differing tastes are valid, but McCarthy's writing is generally an insult to my entire sense of artistic aesthetics, so I don't believe there are two correct opinions on this issue.

And yeah, Liam, most people base opinions on intuition, which is just wrong ^^

[Liam]

I do know what I'm talking about...

...an insult to my entire sense of artistic aesthetics...

I don't believe there are two correct opinions on this issue

...most people base opinions on intuition, which is just wrong...
My-my, the boy is getting more and more fascistic (that a word?) by the minute. What is the world doing to them poor kids? :p

I don't particularly like McCarthy and there are plenty of "established" authors out there who are an insult to MY entire sense of artistic aesthetics, but can't you simply live and let live? I mean, it's like saying that oranges are bad fruit because you happen to be allergic to citrus.

[e joseph]

So Waalkwriter and Bubba, I'm going to give credit here where credit is due. At least in the examples of Blood Meridian and The Road I can see the minimalism with regard to character development. The characters act more as ciphers than actual multidimensional lovable huggable people you'd like to have a beer with. Fair enough.

I've always considered minimalist writing to also contain an economy of words, which clearly (as Mirabell and Chrisphilips point out), McCarthy's writing does not. I'd presume this is why folks like Colette and myself tend to side with them, not because you disagree with me and therefore must be wrong. Sorry Colette to potentially step on any toes here or put words in your mouth...

My problem with the way Waalkwriter and Bubba (hereafter referred to as: yous guys) present your arguments is that you present opinion as fact, and assume that if you present your argument well enough we all must accept your opinionfact . Yous guys present your argument as such:

McCarthy is a minimalist. His characters development is minimal. Minimalism is horrible. McCarthy is horrible. McCarthy is even more horrible because people think he is great.

Yous guys have lost me by sentence three. You offer plenty of reasons why I should accept your first two points. Again, fair enough. You then though expect me to follow you along to your third point, which is that any sort of minimalism is horrible, painful, vomit inducing, whatever else I've forgotten you've taught me. Please stop presenting a mixture of facts and opinions and telling me to swallow the whole mess as one bitter horsepill. Minimalist or not, I enjoy the works of McCarthy and am not really looking to be convinced otherwise. Nor am I looking to convince you that your taste in literature should be changed.

[Mirabell]

I do know what I'm talking about

unlike anyone of us.


the vast majority of critical opinion

and why argue when the majority is clearly always right (why else mention this).

[Stiffelio]

verbose minimalist

Now, I love this oxymoron :confused:

[titania7]

I do know what I'm talking about


Guess what? Everyone else knows what they're talking about, too ;).

This is why the world is full of so much ignorance.

It will only be when people realize how little they know that they will begin to learn anything.

Information is NOT knowledge.

Opinion is not TRUTH.

The logic behind your taking so much time to rant against a writer whom you have so much disdain for is questionable.

As for the argument that Colette brought up as to whether you or Mirabell knows more, I fail to see what an opinion about a specific author or book has to do with knowledge.

Opinions are completely subjective. They are not part of independent truth. They are not knowledge, either.

Another thing I must mention: someone's taste is neither valid or invalid. Validity can only be genuinely attributed to an argument that contains a premise or premises and a conclusion that MIGHT be true. Taste is neither true or false as it is only a matter of subjective opinion.

Validity does not enter into the equation.




most people base opinions on intuition, which is just wrong ^^

Most or many? Be careful with the generalizations.

What you state above is, after all, only YOUR opinion. . . and I would say it, too, is based mostly on intuition, unless you have viable evidence that backs up this declaration.


Alexis


"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is. It doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."
~Richard Feynman

[waalkwriter]

No, I was just responding to what Liam said about most opinions being based on intuition, which, is also a very common thing I come across as well, and I would definitely say it's the case for most of the people I come across, but that's not from my intuition, that's just a flat statement of how I've found a easily discernible majority of people form their opinions.

If information is not knowledge, and opinion cannot be truth, then there is truly absolutely no point to anything and I should never bother putting a pen to paper or a finger to a keyboard again because there is nothing worth writing, nothing at all worth saying because it would all be utterly worthless and meaningless, because there would be no knowledge, and there would be no truth. I cannot handle that world and I do not intend to, sorry. titania.

In my aesthetic philosophy some tastes can be invalid; if what McCarthy and Pynchon do is against not just my tastes but my entire artistic philosophy, then yes I'm going to say they're wrong until they argue away my entire outlook on the world. Now say, on another issue, they just love A Clockwork Orange, and I didn't care all that much to it, now that doesn't matter to me, I would not spend much effort debating that, because their opinion is totally valid because that's not a soft point for me, that's not a glaring attack on my sensibilities as a writer and as a reader.

What I'm trying to finally make clear to some people, like you, is that there is a distinction and if you think I'm doing this just because I dislike McCarthy and have this complex that everyone should agree with me because I'm always right, you are totally wrong.

And you make my last point for me, validity can only be found in how well an argument holds its point, so the truth matters not one bit, just the argument around it, which is why I am such an adamant believer in firm debate. And I don't consider the energy wasted, I love arguing, it's good mental exercise, and it's an amazing tool to help further sharpen your thoughts and points to argue it better with someone else later on in the future.

I'm going to post a thread for people to discuss what their aesthetic philosophies are really, because all these other discussion kind of beat around the bush, they stem from that, but they don't address that overarching issue. So really they are pointless because they aren't getting to the real issue at hand which is what do the people here think is the point of art.

-JW

[waalkwriter]

So Waalkwriter and Bubba, I'm going to give credit here where credit is due. At least in the examples of Blood Meridian and The Road I can see the minimalism with regard to character development. The characters act more as ciphers than actual multidimensional lovable huggable people you'd like to have a beer with. Fair enough.

I've always considered minimalist writing to also contain an economy of words, which clearly (as Mirabell and Chrisphilips point out), McCarthy's writing does not. I'd presume this is why folks like Colette and myself tend to side with them, not because you disagree with me and therefore must be wrong. Sorry Colette to potentially step on any toes here or put words in your mouth...

My problem with the way Waalkwriter and Bubba (hereafter referred to as: yous guys) present your arguments is that you present opinion as fact, and assume that if you present your argument well enough we all must accept your opinionfact . Yous guys present your argument as such:

McCarthy is a minimalist. His characters development is minimal. Minimalism is horrible. McCarthy is horrible. McCarthy is even more horrible because people think he is great.

Yous guys have lost me by sentence three. You offer plenty of reasons why I should accept your first two points. Again, fair enough. You then though expect me to follow you along to your third point, which is that any sort of minimalism is horrible, painful, vomit inducing, whatever else I've forgotten you've taught me. Please stop presenting a mixture of facts and opinions and telling me to swallow the whole mess as one bitter horsepill. Minimalist or not, I enjoy the works of McCarthy and am not really looking to be convinced otherwise. Nor am I looking to convince you that your taste in literature should be changed.

But I do consider the aesthetic philosophy that likes McCarthy to be opposed to my own, quite radically, and therefore it is something to be argued, they cannot both exist and live and let live. I think you condescend and vastly simplify our arguments, especially on character work. The point of writing is not to present two-dimensional characters that sit flat as the page they are written on, that merely perform a long stream of direct and monotonous movements and tasks inhabiting a direct and monotonous landscape, but to present something that can recreate reality better than it is. Life is boring enough for me as it is, life is near meaningless enough for me as it is, I do not need art to make it more so, and please don't presume that my arguments are so simple as you make them out to be.

'luvvable characters' have a beer with them? Please don't insult me with such tripe or condescension, not all the reason I dislike his characters. Blondie in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly had a personality, a great deal of nuance underlies his character, and most of it was not all that subtle. He was far more complex than he appeared to be outwardly, as "The Man with no name." The Kid in Blood Meridian is simply a lifeless figure, and I don't mind that, in fact I love it if we get to see the transformation of innocence, of feeling and being human, into the dead, lifeless character, the destruction of a characters humanity through the violence in that novel. But I never got that, and that's what I couldn't get over, especially the stuck up romantic in me. From page one this empty kid who has no real motivations or passions in life except to drink, ride out in the plains, and be violent, he has no passions, no loves, nothing making him human, no ethics he has to bend to become violent, no morality that has to be destroyed to immerse himself in the figure of the blood god of the plains that he meets up, there is none of that, and that is what I wanted and for it to be lacking is, please say you understand, profoundly, profoundly disappointing to me on a story where literally the sky was the limit when I opened the book and McCarthy never left the ground, in fact he never moved at all from where he was standing to begin with. The same with "All the Pretty Horses" I had such high hopes, I opened the book and read the beautiful opening description of the train moving across the edge of the plain, but without a beautiful observer the description is meaningless, it becomes part of the problem, without a real human element making that observation, feeling that observation, there is nothing in it for me, nothing at all, and that is what makes McCarthy minimalist in tone, sort of the opposite of Hemingway, who was minimalist in style, but not at all in tone. I so wanted to find some shred of something not monotonous and dull in John Grady, to find something to create the tension, the drama of having something destroyed by his experiences, but there was nothing. That's what I don't get. The point of the writer is very simply to create that, if he does and does it successfully, he really does not need to do anything else, write anything else, say anything else, all style is absolutely pointless, mere extension of getting that done in some way or some fashion.

The same with The Road, I was searching for something to make me root for these characters, to make me sympathize for them, something beautiful in them, something human in them, but even the father-son bond thing does not work for me when it's written as stoically as McCarthy, there is emotion there, perhaps, in the writing, but it is that of the author and not the character, the characters remain emotionless even when surrounded by pools of emotion dripping out of McCarthy's stylistic prose. Because of that I can never associate with them, never attach part of myself to them, there is no dock, and therefore I can never actually get into his novels and get lost in the beauty of a great story well told.

Flawed or not, I haven't simplified anyone else's opinions on the matter, I've just flat out disqualified them in sweeping statements :D

[waalkwriter]

unlike anyone of us.



and why argue when the majority is clearly always right (why else mention this).

Now now, mirabel, no need to get rude or start taking offense by inserting words into my mouth, God knows i am wordy enough as it is without people starting to add to it.

That is the completely wrong suggestion, and I dislike it, especially since I have given appropriate deference for your more extensive knowledge at every step of this discussion, and have given nothing but the utmost courtesy to your extensive reading and skill with English, so I feel to suggest that I was saying no one knew what they were talking about is plain disingenuous, I was responding to the suggest, on Collette's part, that I did not know what I was talking about. Now, had I said, "i actually do know what I'm talking about" that would have been an insult suggesting now one else knew what they were talking about, but I didn't, I instead said the exasperated statement, "I do know what I'm talking about." to rebuke suggestions I was talking out of my ass, as the expression goes.

Yes stiefello, that is a good oxymoron, verbose minimalist, a better way to put it would be that McCarthy is a minimalist in tone if not style.

Finally, to wrap up discussions of all these wonderful comments, Liam, it's not fascist at all. Consider politics, consider the two overarching philosophies that form the core of a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican, what you get to when you've really cut all the fat from everything else. Okay, you have two opposing opinions, two opposing views; one basically amounts to saying that some measure of equality is important and that government has a role in improving and looking after the well-being of it's most needy citizens, and the other amounts to basically saying that one, the government cannot lift people up, only they themselves can, and all the government can do is end up interfering and making matters worse a lot of the time, that ultimately people must do it themselves and that society works best that way.

Two radically opposed worldviews, both looking to establish authority over which one is the most legitimate, therefore the debate between them. This argument is really just an extension of my artistic sensibility, my worldview in art, my core beliefs about the purpose of art, not my personal taste or distaste for the style personally, are in conflict, so I there are really two choices, toss my beliefs aside, or debate them through this example. I don't think that there is any simple live and let live attitude, beyond of course the fact that this is just a simple debate in the end, a friendly discussion, (I think, but other people have tended to think I'm coming off as especially mean, or rude, or angry when I'm truly not), and when I get up it bears no consequence on me or anyone else, it is merely an exercise in its own right, for itself and nothing else. But within that exercise it is supremely important, and thus every argument is always treated, by me at least, of ultimate importance within the actual debate, outside it's meaningless, but while inside, while immersed in it, it is something to discuss with absolute passion.

But don't think I'm incapable of putting something like aside, or of moving on, or that it holds an enormous bearing on me, not at all the impression I wished to give.

God, I have written far too much on this, and none of it on topic, but I always respond ;) and pretty much everything that was written to be responded to was not on debating the merits of the McCarthy opinions but criticizing me or various things I said or how I came about them, so I have had to spend all of this space merely discussing those aspects instead of McCarthy and defending myself and what i said and why I said it. But then again, that is also something that I enjoy a great deal. :rolleyes:

[Bubba]

So Waalkwriter and Bubba, I'm going to give credit here where credit is due. At least in the examples of Blood Meridian and The Road I can see the minimalism with regard to character development. The characters act more as ciphers than actual multidimensional lovable huggable people you'd like to have a beer with. Fair enough.

I've always considered minimalist writing to also contain an economy of words, which clearly (as Mirabell and Chrisphilips point out), McCarthy's writing does not. I'd presume this is why folks like Colette and myself tend to side with them, not because you disagree with me and therefore must be wrong. Sorry Colette to potentially step on any toes here or put words in your mouth...

My problem with the way Waalkwriter and Bubba (hereafter referred to as: yous guys) present your arguments is that you present opinion as fact, and assume that if you present your argument well enough we all must accept your opinionfact . Yous guys present your argument as such:

McCarthy is a minimalist. His characters development is minimal. Minimalism is horrible. McCarthy is horrible. McCarthy is even more horrible because people think he is great.

Yous guys have lost me by sentence three. You offer plenty of reasons why I should accept your first two points. Again, fair enough. You then though expect me to follow you along to your third point, which is that any sort of minimalism is horrible, painful, vomit inducing, whatever else I've forgotten you've taught me. Please stop presenting a mixture of facts and opinions and telling me to swallow the whole mess as one bitter horsepill. Minimalist or not, I enjoy the works of McCarthy and am not really looking to be convinced otherwise. Nor am I looking to convince you that your taste in literature should be changed.

I post with some trepidation, as I fear Thomas may pop up again to signal to all the world yet another manifestation of the "segond baz? bitter poddle," but in your post, joseph, misleading on many counts, was one thing, one unforgivable thing, I could not let pass without comment. Frederick, Maryland, is south of the Mason-Dixon, is it not? Maryland was a border state, was it not? Then why, why for God's sake, use that Yankee abomination "yous guys" in place of the elegant and autochthonous "y'all" or "y'all's?"

As for matters of less import, I do think that McCarthy's character development is minimal and that McCarthy is somehow worse than he would be if there weren't legions of fanatical McCarthyites. But I don't think McCarthy's work is absolutely horrible (that I can sometimes enjoy it, despite a style I do find horrible and the cipher-like characters, is a testament to the man's talent).

Nor do I think "minimalism," whatever that might be, is horrible. I associate it with Hemingway's Nick Adams stories, which I think are excellent, or with Raymond Carver, whose work I also like very much. Carver, of course, had lots of mediocre acolytes whose work was likewise termed "minimalist."

And, finally, where are all the brave descriptivists who came crawling out of the woodwork on other threads to suggest (irony of ironies) that we ought to be descriptivists rather than prescriptivists? Nowhere is the definition of "minimalism" set in stone.


The same with "All the Pretty Horses" I had such high hopes, I opened the book and read the beautiful opening description of the train moving across the edge of the plain, but without a beautiful observer the description is meaningless, it becomes part of the problem, without a real human element making that observation, feeling that observation, there is nothing in it for me, nothing at all, and that is what makes McCarthy minimalist in tone, sort of the opposite of Hemingway, who was minimalist in style, but not at all in tone.

Well put, Waalkwriter. You should try Stendhal.

[saliotthomas]

When beauty is abstracted, then ugliness has been implied; When good is abstracted then evil has been implied , as well as intense masturbation- Tao de Ch'ing

[Colette Jones]

I've always considered minimalist writing to also contain an economy of words, which clearly (as Mirabell and Chrisphilips point out), McCarthy's writing does not. I'd presume this is why folks like Colette and myself tend to side with them, not because you disagree with me and therefore must be wrong. Sorry Colette to potentially step on any toes here or put words in your mouth...
Yes, partly that, but mostly because of waalkwriter's stated reason for arguing so vehemently. The only other option is nihilism? It's just another case of "It's about me" rather than "It's about the book".

[Igu Soni]

I pick disagreement with whoever (I'm not going to go looking for the post to quote from) said it's bad to argue from you instincts. The fact is, we all argue with our instincts. That is why we say different things in response to different lines of attack. That is why Huxley said that the best points are the ones that bring out into articulation things that you always knew. That is why, in philsosophy, it is so important to know what the problem a certain thought was trying to solve was.

Juat as an example, take Herta Muller's The Land of Green Plums. Almost every articulate reader on this forum noticed that meaning was being built up. I described it using metaphors:

The handling of these metaphors within the beautiful writing; whatever forms of shallowness I found the book guilty of, emotional wasn?t one of them. Recently, I went to a short film making workshop, in which the instructor said that the best stories were the ones that had embedded in them the idea of a circle. I don?t know if I agree, but I can tell you one thing: this book takes the form of a circle, on the level of story, on the level of character, and on the level of ambient metaphor, and in this particular instance, at least, that?s how it works.
promtbr explained it thus:

Its not your typical language, as she infuses nouns, objects in sentences gradually with more multiplicities of meaning each time they recur, they become re-contextualized each time, resonating and refering back to the layers as the narrative builds. I have to emphasize it is NOT ponderous reading.
I think everyone here will agree that we were saying much the same thing. Why? Because we were trying to explain the same emotional fact.
What's my point here? That we say different things and mean the same things, because there is no uniform way to articulate the unimaginable complexity of your reason.

The power of the unarticulated thought, to summarise, is much higher than you can ever imagine, and is the basic complaint of Eastern philosophies with Western ones.

[anchomal]

I can't quite understand why, if someone suffers that much of a headache from reading, say, Blood Meridian, why then bother to pick up All the Pretty Horses, Suttree, The Road, etc. If you don't like reading McCarthy, waalkwriter (and I'd say it's pretty safe to assume that you don't) then why persist with him? His books aren't exactly throwaways. They are hundreds of pages long and require effort and concentration. Surely that would be time better spent jumping to another author. There are plenty of good ones out there, ones to suit all tastes. And we only get so much of it, you know...
I think you mentioned Larry McMurtry somewhere back along... Thanks for reminding me of him. At his best he is a fine writer, with some wonderful books to his name, (though he has penned a few stinkers too). I must dig out my old copy of Leaving Cheyanne...

[Colette Jones]

I can't quite understand why, if someone suffers that much of a headache from reading, say, Blood Meridian, why then bother to pick up All the Pretty Horses, Suttree, The Road, etc.
Excellent point!

[lenz]

What's my point here? That we say different things and mean the same things, because there is no uniform way to articulate the unimaginable complexity of your reason.

The power of the unarticulated thought, to summarise, is much higher than you can ever imagine, and is the basic complaint of Eastern philosophies with Western ones.

True, there is no uniform way to state what we mean to say, but there is a way to argue logically, from evidence in a given text, an opinion on the meaning or quality of that text.
I'm not going to discuss Eastern versus Western philosophies with you because, first, I don't know enough about them, and second, this is not a philosophy forum, it's a literature forum.
If you just want to say that you like or dislike a book, and that's all you can say, than say it and leave it at that. If you want to explain what it is exactly that makes you feel a certain way about it, then do that using evidence from the text and without using words that you don't know the meaning of. If you want to be able to express yourself clearly in a literary discussion, read a book or two about how to do that.

[e joseph]

'luvvable characters' have a beer with them? Please don't insult me with such tripe or condescension

Yeah, I don't find my post to be condescending at all. And please don't do the same to me by misquoting me as using the word "luvvable". Was that your version of subtle?

None of what you accuse McCarthy of is valid. You keep pointing out why you don't like him (which is totally acceptable) and insisting that this makes him a horrible writer. If McCarthy were trying book after book to write characters for you or anyone else to sympathize with, characters that jump off the page and become alive, and failing at it, then sure maybe I could agree with you. He's not though. The characters exist only for the actions they perform, and the circumstances with which they must contend. Done. I know you'll feel compelled to point out that you hate this. Don't. Again, I know. I know you feel like this is not what an author's job is. It's not. If this is why I'm coming off condescending to you, it's probably largely due to that ridiculous belief of yours.

As for simplifying your opinions, I thought I'd cut your arguments down the basic skeletal form that I feel like they all adhere to post after post so I could point out a major flaw in them. Not suggesting your thoughts can be dumbed down in totality to that degree. You're obviously a bright person, just one with a giant chip on your shoulder and a complex for not being taken as seriously as you think people ought. This is the reason the arguments have veered from the topic of McCarthy's writing. You're just not arguing fairly. Or well.

[e joseph]

Colette-
Yup, totally get that. And sorry for actually dragging you into my post and assuming I knew what the reasons for your thinking were. The arguments being made against you just seemed so ridiculous that I felt compelled to say something. Sorry! *insert aggravating smiley here*

Bubba-
That is the first time I've ever used the phrase "yous guys" ever. Ya'll sounds friendly, and I just wasn't going for that tone. If you're in Maryland, you sorta get to choose whether you're Northern or Southern. As a state, we always vote with the New Englanders, yet there's Confederate flags being flown all over the place. We're multidimensional like that. As for my post, in retrospect it seems like it holds more water for Waalkwriter's attitudes than yours; I lumped you both together when I shouldn't have. Sorry 'bout that. Maybe I just really wanted to try that "yous guys" thing out.

[Colette Jones]

Colette-
Yup, totally get that. And sorry for actually dragging you into my post and assuming I knew what the reasons for your thinking were. The arguments being made against you just seemed so ridiculous that I felt compelled to say something. Sorry! *insert aggravating smiley here*
No problem at all, I'm pleased that you did!

[Igu Soni]

True, there is no uniform way to state what we mean to say, but there is a way to argue logically, from evidence in a given text, an opinion on the meaning or quality of that text.
I'm not going to discuss Eastern versus Western philosophies with you because, first, I don't know enough about them, and second, this is not a philosophy forum, it's a literature forum.
If you just want to say that you like or dislike a book, and that's all you can say, than say it and leave it at that. If you want to explain what it is exactly that makes you feel a certain way about it, then do that using evidence from the text and without using words that you don't know the meaning of. If you want to be able to express yourself clearly in a literary discussion, read a book or two about how to do that.
In a flight of irony, I have to say that I only said because someone said, almost to the word, that it's wrong to argue from our instincts, and I was saying that we all do. Truly, and obviously too, the process of argument must involve articulation (which is the grouse I currently have against Eastern philosophy).

You are right on one count, though: that philosophy bit was uncalled-for. Sorry. I'm no expert either, I merely speak from one year of defending science against a staunch Buddhist.

[waalkwriter]

The characters exist only for the actions they perform, and the circumstances with which they must contend.

I don't consider that literature. That's been the entire point of my argument, and I think i could say any better or more repetitively than I already have, I gone into excruciating detail, drenched into monotony over trying to make it as thoroughly and as completely as I could. I don't think it can be said a whole lot better than I said it.

And the reason I kept reading McCarthy is because I felt pressured to give him a fair shot, especially when he has such a following. Bubba was very right, e joseph, McCarthy is far more annoying knowing that he is a popular literary writer, to read his writing and it occur to you that many people actually find this to be good writing, in fact that's the single most annoying thing about him, it's definitely a valid point in arguing against him, as much as you'd like to say it isn't.

My whole point was that literature has a certain purpose, McCarthy doesn't serve that purpose and therefore isn't literature, wanna argue that? Fine, argue my aesthetics.

So my entire aesthetic philosophy is a ridiculous belief to you? Come off it. The reason I get vitriolic is people like you who feel compelled to dismiss through condescension rather than actual debate an opinion or belief you disagree with, which is worse than me arguing that someone's taste is wrong, I see no problem with arguing with someone that there opinion is just flat out wrong, but you have to give them the respect of actually arguing it instead of just dismissing it.

The author has a certain obligation that he must fulfill, a bargain he makes with putting his work out there for the reader, McCarthy does not put the effort in I feel to do this, I feel he is lacking as a writer, and it annoys me greatly to see him praised; any praise for McCarthy is nothing but a subtle insult against my taste, so of course I'm going to argue this, e joseph, if it is in fact, as it appears, the fact that I'm debating a matter of taste, and not so much what I'm saying, that annoys you.

I don't insist that every writer I dislike is a terrible writer period, you don't seem to get that, this is a special case, it's specific case where I dislike a writer for reasons the transcend whether or not he simply appeals to me or not. I don't try to discredit every writer or even a small minority of writers I don't care for or dislike. This is a very unique case, he is among a handful of writers I detest with every fiber of my being and consider to be harmful to the purity of literature itself, so, please understand that is the case before criticizing my argument any further. :rolleyes:

[Mirabell]

it's specific case where I dislike a writer for reasons the transcend whether or not he simply appeals to me or not. I don't try to discredit every writer or even a small minority of writers I don't care for or dislike. This is a very unique case, he is among a handful of writers I detest with every fiber of my being and consider to be harmful to the purity of literature itself, so, please understand that is the case before criticizing my argument any further. :rolleyes:


I will say this. You, Mister, are very entertaining.

[waalkwriter]

I will say this. You, Mister, are very entertaining.

I try to be ;) Any argument is interesting and entertaining, really, I don't understand the people here who claim to dislike it, would there ever be any continuing discussions here without some good arguments? What fun is it if we're constantly around a bunch of people who immediately fold and qualify our opinions as valid? Who only talk about what they love and why they love it? None at all, be a bit boring really :D

[e joseph]

I don't insist that every writer I dislike is a terrible writer period, you don't seem to get that, this is a special case
Actually, I do get that. Just because it's a special case doesn't make it less wrong.

I would argue your aesthetics. I don't feel that a writer is obligated to create the characters you feel they must. Ditto your issues with his sentence structure.

I still don't find myself to be condescending.

[Colette Jones]

I still don't find myself to be condescending.
You're not.

[Mirabell]

Actually, I do get that. Just because it's a special case doesn't make it less wrong.

I would argue your aesthetics. I don't feel that a writer is obligated to create the characters you feel they must. Ditto your issues with his sentence structure.

I still don't find myself to be condescending.

You're not. The word is 'correct'. I found you on point and correct.

[Colette Jones]

You're not. The word is 'correct'. I found you on point and correct.
Me too.
...and I have to lengthen to at least 10 characters, hence this section of sentence...

[waalkwriter]

You're not.

You both are, mirabel too. Don't sit around and make statements, back them up with debate. It's already obvious mirabel that I don't think that E Joseph is correct.

E Joseph, its not about creating the character "I" want the writer to create, it's about simply creating characters that have life, that are human, that have human emotions, impulses, etc. A book should be more than a series of characters existing within an elaborate prose exercise like McCarthy seems to be doing most times. Just because something sounds beautiful doesn't mean it is; McCarthy's works are, to paraphrase Shakespeare ever so slight, "are a tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Why do they signify nothing, because there is not a true character, a truly living, vibrant character that embodies some sort of human pathos or ethos, in any of his books. With McCarthy's strong emphasis on minimalist characters no amount of flowery, over-stuffed prose can lift his books out of monotonous drudgery.

As for sentence structure, it's also not about creating the sentence structure I want, I've left the field pretty wide open, I just don't believe in using declarative sentences. They create a dry stoic tone that deprives writing of what I feel is beautiful, and they very quickly get repetitive:


For the next two weeks they would ride by night, they would make no fire. They had struck the shoes from their horses and filled the nailholes in with clay and those who still had tobacco used their pouches to spit in and they slept in caves and on bare stone. They rode through the tracks of their dismounting and they buried their stool like cats and they barely spoke at all.

All that direct action is frankly boring and to focus on such style and straightforward sentence structure McCarthy deprives his writing of most of its nuance.

What's more is that as a writer I can tell you that declarative sentences are not a challenge to write. It is much harder to write a half-page stream of consciousness jumble of interrupting thoughts and images and make it work that it is to directly make an observation beautifully and make it well.

Here is a very good example from the very first Chapter:


See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire.

And that's just all I have on me, I recall that was part of a very long stream of " He's blah blah period". So it's not about me saying a writer can only use a narrow selection of sentences, but variety is important, and good writing is important, declarative sentences are I feel the anti-thesis of good writing, they annoy me more than writing that is filled with cliches and simile. They tend to suck the life out of a novel very quickly, and to reuse an apt word from early, cause it to descend into drudgery. I am firm believer that using them extensively is poor form and bad writing and that's a major part of my argument.

Then there's the element personally of McCarthy, who is a writer more than any other, whom I find both in his writing and in his life, to be the embodiment of literary pretentiousness.

Hopefully this will get an actual response debating what was said, I have been trying, going into more and more specific detail and still I get nothing. nothing more of the same, and from Mirabell, making disrespectful statements directed towards me, rather than actually putting any effort to treat my opinions with the same respect and debate them with the same thoroughness and respect that I have debated your opinions. A good debate over an issue only occurs when both sides actually put in the effort and thought in counter each others statements, we can't seem to get off square one because you guys are too busy simply sitting and condescending me to actually argue anything at all relevant to the issue at hand.

[e joseph]

My whole point was that literature has a certain purpose, McCarthy doesn't serve that purpose and therefore isn't literature, wanna argue that?



I haven't dismissed McCarthy as art or literature
I'll just let you two battle it out then.

That one could be a little condescending.

[e joseph]

Thanks Mirabell and Colette. I appreciate the feedback on my suggested condescension.

[waalkwriter]

I'll just let you two battle it out then.

That one could be a little condescending.


Hmm, I remember the second one, but the first one feels like it was either edited or came out wrong, I find it hard to believe I would have used the term, "wanna argue that", I would feel a little to much like a character out of a Scorcese film :D

But the second statement is perhaps a bit of slip on my part, but perhaps they can both be reconciled. I think i failed to show any nuance, so those don't make sense. I guess the way to say it would be that I am dismissing McCarthy as good literature, but not necessarily dismissing his very existence. Sometimes in the rush to express these kinds of thoughts on a limited time schedule stuff gets crammed together and I don't express my meaning clearer.

However you did just prove my point by bringing that up rather than discuss any of my quotes or try to debate or counter any of the opinion I presented on them and their use of tone and declarative sentences.

[waalkwriter]

Thanks Mirabell and Colette. I appreciate the feedback on my suggested condescension.

So this isn't condescending:


I would argue your aesthetics. I don't feel that a writer is obligated to create the characters you feel they must. Ditto your issues with his sentence structure.

Again, I know. I know you feel like this is not what an author's job is. It's not. If this is why I'm coming off condescending to you, it's probably largely due to that ridiculous belief of yours.What ridiculous belief? If you're going to call a belief ridiculous i thought it was an unspoken rule you had to define it correctly, (and you have really been mauling my beliefs on the issue), and then you had to extensively explain why you find it ridiculous. Nor did you explain, what then, is the writers duty, because I find that the writer has a sacred obligation to the reader in keeping his end of the bargain in creating universal human truths, bringing about human connection, taking human relationships and making them transcend the ordinary, and creating a setting of place that the reader can feel intensely.

As for me wanting people to take me more seriously? Yes, hell yes! People should take me as seriously as I take them, if i didn't take your opinions seriously would i devote so much time and energy into thoroughly attempting to refute them?

You've been nothing if not condescending this entire time, and just because people who agree with you find like it doesn't mean you haven't been, you started in your very first statement when you had the gall to say I don't like McCarthy's characters because they "aren't the sort you'd like to have a beer with." What? Just what? Even if that was meant to be sarcastic it's still an incredibly insulting statement considering what I was actually saying.

[e joseph]

I also proved your point by admitting I was being condescending.

My final point is that I once again am not suggesting you're not right about McCarthy's characters. I'm not suggesting you're saying the author's job is to write characters that appeal to you. What I'm saying is that it's not a writer's job necessarily to create characters "that have life, that are human, that have human emotions, impulses, etc".

OK, OK, more points. I don't find McCarthy's writing boring. I find the sentences to build on each other and create an appealing rhythm; it helps, for me, to really set off the story. When I think of Blood Meridian, the word bludgeon comes to mind, and I think the passages illustrated are part of what makes it work for me.

I honestly don't care about McCarthy as a person. Sorry C-mac (as I imagine you like to be called) if you're reading this. I just don't.

[waalkwriter]

I also proved your point by admitting I was being condescending.

My final point is that I once again am not suggesting you're not right about McCarthy's characters. I'm not suggesting you're saying the author's job is to write characters that appeal to you. What I'm saying is that it's not a writer's job necessarily to create characters "that have life, that are human, that have human emotions, impulses, etc".

OK, OK, more points. I don't find McCarthy's writing boring. I find the sentences to build on each other and create an appealing rhythm; it helps, for me, to really set off the story. When I think of Blood Meridian, the word bludgeon comes to mind, and I think the passages illustrated are part of what makes it work for me.

I honestly don't care about McCarthy as a person. Sorry C-mac (as I imagine you like to be called) if you're reading this. I just don't.

C-Mac, lol. Just lol. I'm afraid I can't handle being bludgeoned personally, I love rhythm in writing, but I can't handle the short repetitive rhythm, i feel it rids it nuance and it really is something that has a tendency to flat out give me a headache after awhile, usually out of annoyance. I feel the writing that is the highest achievement is the Faulknerian writing, the vast sentences, sentences that have punctuation in places and then have a long empty stretch echoing out without a single comma or dash, sentences that interrupt, that contradict, that have virtual civil wars with themselves, that are filled with subtle sound and are held together not so much by the language or grammar as the nuance underlying the way it is written and the way the sound and tone shifts and flows and changes.

[e joseph]

So this isn't condescending:

What ridiculous belief? If you're going to call a belief ridiculous i thought it was an unspoken rule you had to define it correctly, (and you have really been mauling my beliefs on the issue), and then you had to extensively explain why you find it ridiculous. Nor did you explain, what then, is the writers duty, because I find that the writer has a sacred obligation to the reader in keeping his end of the bargain in creating universal human truths, bringing about human connection, taking human relationships and making them transcend the ordinary, and creating a setting of place that the reader can feel intensely.

As for me wanting people to take me more seriously? Yes, hell yes! People should take me as seriously as I take them, if i didn't take your opinions seriously would i devote so much time and energy into thoroughly attempting to refute them?

You've been nothing if not condescending this entire time, and just because people who agree with you find like it doesn't mean you haven't been, you started in your very first statement when you had the gall to say I don't like McCarthy's characters because they "aren't the sort you'd like to have a beer with." What? Just what? Even if that was meant to be sarcastic it's still an incredibly insulting statement considering what I was actually saying.
This was close to going into Private Message land, so anyone feel free to let me know if it reaches that point; I'm not sure where the bounds of what is of interest to the forum lie in regard to this thread.

I'm not being condescending. I don't literally mean you must want to get a beer with every interesting character. I honest to god use that expression in my real life to describe people I'd be interested in chatting with. Tom Waits for example. I'd like to have a beer with Tom Waits. Or Captain Ahab. I've repeatedly said that I agree with your assessment on McCarthy's characters. I've acknowledged you shouldn't be a fan of his books if multidimensional jump off the page characters are your interest. If you took this as being condescending, I take no credit.

I never said you shouldn't want to be taken seriously. I'm suggesting you have a complex that you feel like people don't take you as seriously as they ought. Maybe your perception differs from reality. I don't know/care. I have just as much interest in you as a person as I do Cormac McCarthy.

I think it's ridiculous that you think the writer has a duty. I've never suggested what I think a writer's duty is because I don't believe writers have one, other than that they should write. Does this make them good? Nope.

[lenz]

a sacred obligation to the reader

Since when? Is the reader god?

[e joseph]

C-Mac, lol. Just lol. I'm afraid I can't handle being bludgeoned personally, I love rhythm in writing, but I can't handle the short repetitive rhythm, i feel it rids it nuance and it really is something that has a tendency to flat out give me a headache after awhile, usually out of annoyance. I feel the writing that is the highest achievement is the Faulknerian writing, the vast sentences, sentences that have punctuation in places and then have a long empty stretch echoing out without a single comma or dash, sentences that interrupt, that contradict, that have virtual civil wars with themselves, that are filled with subtle sound and are held together not so much by the language or grammar as the nuance underlying the way it is written and the way the sound and tone shifts and flows and changes.
I find there's room for both in what I enjoy reading. If a writer attempts one or the other and noticeably fails, that I have a problem with. I think Faulkner and McCarthy both achieve the style they're trying for with impressive results.

[saliotthomas]

When beauty is abstracted, then ugliness has been implied; When good is abstracted then evil has been implied, then it's time to pull ones finger from one arse and face the world . - Tao de Ch'ing

[waalkwriter]

Well I took as being condescending.

And yes, lenz, to the writer the reader is his God. The writer creates nothing, he is a worthless and frivolous individual, a tree falling in an empty woods, he can only destroy what he sees, break down into something else. The reader is the creator, the reader is the bestower of meaning, and it is the reader that makes a text meaningful.

If The and The Fury had never been published but was still sitting in a trunk somewhere would it still have an independent importance? No.

So yes, the bond between writer and reader is something I take very seriously, and think that that duty is important, and that duty is fulfilling the purpose of literature. At a core level i suppose mine is much narrower than yours Joseph.

[Bottle Rocket]

Okay, so I'm going to play pedant a while longer as in #86.

"A myriad of" is accepted by many (probably most) dictionaries. So also are "different than" and "irregardless" Surely it cannot be long before "penultimate" come to actually mean what millions already think it means.

"A myriad of" is by far the poor cousin, here. The noun is a back-formation designed to legitimate a common error. More to the point, this is clear when you try to use "a [myriad] of" but replacing "myriad" with its supposed synonym nouns. "A thousands of" "a big huge but unspecified number of."

It's correct only in the sense that "thanks to the fact that" means "because."


More to the point, "myriad" is a "dazzle'em'rubes" kind of word, useful maybe for a pastiche of Pericles-meets-Corneille. Among its cousins are "oenophile," "paraphiliac," "rebarbatitive," etc etc. All words which would almost certainly be better replaced with their common-or-garden meanings. There is, IMHO, no case in which "myriad" is an improvement over "countless" -- but that's just my opinion.

However, I hold this opinion so dear, and have so taken to heart the excerpts of CMcC here posted, as well as the reviews, it will be a very long time before I bother with his work. IN MY OPINION: his style is over-the-top pretentious, and he doesn't strike me as having anything to say that hasn't been said earlier and better. It really isn't worth disagreeing with me, not that I would mind; IMHO I just have many other better things to do with my time.


:) BRocket :)

[Mirabell]

You both are, mirabel too.

So, everyone is, except you and the poodle?

(just trying to get this right)

[Mirabell]

The noun is a back-formation designed to legitimate a common error.


No. The noun is actually the older form. A common mistake among peevologists.


Throughout most of its history in English myriad was used as a noun, as in a myriad of men. In the 19th century it began to be used in poetry as an adjective, as in myriad men. Both usages in English are acceptable, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Myriad myriads of lives." This poetic, adjectival use became so well entrenched generally that many people came to consider it as the only correct use.

[waalkwriter]

No. The noun is actually the older form. A common mistake among peevologists.

I think you just got taught br, by a non-native speaker to say the least ^^

And hey, don't go dogging the word paraphiliac, I love that word, almost as much as commaphiliac.

[Mirabell]

I think you just got taught br, by a non-native speaker to say the least ^^

Actually, by the American Heritage Dictionary, and an education in linguistics.

ALso, if you prefer, the American linguist Arnold Zwicky (currently at Stanford) Language Log Myriad (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=428)

[miercuri]

And yes, lenz, to the writer the reader is his God. The writer creates nothing, he is a worthless and frivolous individual, a tree falling in an empty woods, he can only destroy what he sees, break down into something else. The reader is the creator, the reader is the bestower of meaning, and it is the reader that makes a text meaningful.

Seriously, Roland Barthes has created monsters. I do believe he meant well by empowering the reader in a time when the reader had little or no power at all, but he took it too far. How can a reader be a reader if he is reading nothing? When we read a book, we don't read it alone, we read it along with the writer, our guide. A writer will always place quidelines, hints as to which meaning his text bears. We readers unconsciously look for these hints precisely because we wouldn't be able to give it any meaning otherwise. I believe this applies to all texts ever, except for Dadaist literature and the likes, they're the only texts on which Barthes's theory can actually work.
Even if we, as readers, have complete freedom of interpretation, the number of interpretations is always limited by elements which can be found in the text. And no reader should find this disempowering. Faulkner, for instance, starts The Sound and the Fury with Benjy's section and builds up on it in the rest of the novel, revealing the key in which the first section should be read. Or Joyce, in Eveline, he doesn't state a reason for which Eveline won't leave Ireland, but there are elements in the text which considerably narrow down the list of suppositions and those elements are there because the author wanted them to be.
Sorry for ranting, but this topic always tends to get me worked up.

[lenz]

When we read a book, we don't read it alone, we read it along with the writer, our guide.

Thank you, Miercuri.

[Igu Soni]

Seriously, Roland Barthes has created monsters. I do believe he meant well by empowering the reader in a time when the reader had little or no power at all, but he took it too far. How can a reader be a reader if he is reading nothing? When we read a book, we don't read it alone, we read it along with the writer, our guide. A writer will always place quidelines, hints as to which meaning his text bears. We readers unconsciously look for these hints precisely because we wouldn't be able to give it any meaning otherwise. I believe this applies to all texts ever, except for Dadaist literature and the likes, they're the only texts on which Barthes's theory can actually work.
Even if we, as readers, have complete freedom of interpretation, the number of interpretations is always limited by elements which can be found in the text. And no reader should find this disempowering. Faulkner, for instance, starts The Sound and the Fury with Benjy's section and builds up on it in the rest of the novel, revealing the key in which the first section should be read. Or Joyce, in Eveline, he doesn't state a reason for which Eveline won't leave Ireland, but there are elements in the text which considerably narrow down the list of suppositions and those elements are there because the author wanted them to be.
Sorry for ranting, but this topic always tends to get me worked up.
Hear! Hear!

Sorry, but I felt compelled to express my complete agreement with miercuri.

[Mirabell]

Seriously, Roland Barthes has created monsters. I do believe he meant well by empowering the reader in a time when the reader had little or no power at all, but he took it too far. How can a reader be a reader if he is reading nothing? When we read a book, we don't read it alone, we read it along with the writer, our guide. A writer will always place quidelines, hints as to which meaning his text bears. We readers unconsciously look for these hints precisely because we wouldn't be able to give it any meaning otherwise. I believe this applies to all texts ever, except for Dadaist literature and the likes, they're the only texts on which Barthes's theory can actually work.
Even if we, as readers, have complete freedom of interpretation, the number of interpretations is always limited by elements which can be found in the text. And no reader should find this disempowering. Faulkner, for instance, starts The Sound and the Fury with Benjy's section and builds up on it in the rest of the novel, revealing the key in which the first section should be read. Or Joyce, in Eveline, he doesn't state a reason for which Eveline won't leave Ireland, but there are elements in the text which considerably narrow down the list of suppositions and those elements are there because the author wanted them to be.
Sorry for ranting, but this topic always tends to get me worked up.


I recommend re-reading Barthes, carefully.

[e joseph]

I think you just got taught br, by a non-native speaker to say the least ^^

Yeah, sometimes I can barely understand that guy.

His long thoughtfully composed essays (and there are a lot of them) really back you up on the idea that the grasp on the language isn't quite sufficient.

I do think it's cute though how dismissive you are of someone who I find writes much better in english, and with a better understanding of the workings of linguistics in general, than the vast majority of folks that have spoken/written the language all their lives.

Edit: Also, I've always assumed you (Mirabell) have been exposed to english all your life. Not true?

[Galatea92]

I recommend re-reading Barthes, carefully.

Could you explain in a little more detail why you think Miercuri is wrong about Barthes? Just pointing her at Barthes' vast output isn't very helpful. I'm not saying this because I disagree with you - I'd just like to hear what you think - you're a smart guy, I'm sure I'll learn something.

[Mirabell]

Could you explain in a little more detail why you think Miercuri is wrong about Barthes? Just pointing her at Barthes' vast output isn't very helpful. I'm not saying this because I disagree with you - I'd just like to hear what you think - you're a smart guy, I'm sure I'll learn something.

Would take too much time, more than I have, because it's a difficult topic and 'a little more detail' wouldn't cut it. and since M. is a student I assume she's willing and able to do a thorough reading of a few central Barthes' text. That's what I meant by that comment.

[Galatea92]

Would take too much time, more than I have, because it's a difficult topic and 'a little more detail' wouldn't cut it. and since M. is a student I assume she's willing and able to do a thorough reading of a few central Barthes' text. That's what I meant by that comment.

Fair enough. I was just hoping for a free tutorial :).

[miercuri]

I recommend re-reading Barthes, carefully.
I know there is so much I have to learn and I am planning on it. :) I have only read La mort de l'auteur and a bit more about him, last year. But frankly, I don't think that rereading Barthes will make me agree with waalkwriter's statement which prompted me to mention Barthes. What I wrote are mostly common-sense observations to me and I did not mean to sound patronising in any way. I could say they make up an 'aesthetic credo' of mine. It's just that I found waalkwriter's statement to be unhealthy approach to reading and to some extent I think it contradicted his aesthetic philosophy from the other thread.

[Mirabell]

I know there is so much I have to learn and I am planning on it. :) I have only read La mort de l'auteur and a bit more about him, last year. But frankly, I don't think that rereading Barthes will make me agree with waalkwriter's statement which prompted me to mention Barthes. What I wrote are mostly common-sense observations to me and I did not mean to sound patronising in any way. I could say they make up an 'aesthetic credo' of mine. It's just that I found waalkwriter's statement to be unhealthy approach to reading and to some extent I think it contradicted his aesthetic philosophy from the other thread.


No no, w. could stand some reading himself. I just meant that you do not do Barthes justice, and the essay (speech, really) in question does not represent his work very well.

[waalkwriter]

Roland Barthes or John Barthe?

[Refus de Sejour]

The WIkipedia entry on Barthes is pretty good for a start, and I'd recommend S/Z as an case-study of his theory of reading. It'll certainly demonstrate, Mirecuri, that he never claimed the reader was reading "nothing."

I'm ambivalent towards a lot of literary theory myself; but I do think that, if you're going to condemn something, you're obliged to make sure you understand what you're condemning :)

[Mirabell]

if you're going to condemn something, you're obliged to make sure you understand what you're condemning :)

I'm biting my tongue but yes, sometimes I'm quite tempted to say/write that myself. Well.


I second the s/z recommendation, it's not his best book, but it's interesting. I'm quite partial to Sade, Fourier, Loyola.

[Bottle Rocket]

Just by way of being contrary:

Here (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=myriad), there is NO cite for a noun version of "myriad"

Here too is an etymology (at some length) without a noun usage cited for "myriad"

Here's an Oxford-related bibliography of dozens of titles with "myriad" in them; not one uses it as a noun.

I'm in bed and can't be bothered to hunt up my full-scale OED, but the "noun" usage will post-date the adjectival one by the same degree that Greek predates English. Further, it's is in all likelihood a "new" usage created by a bunch of second-rate dictionaries copying one another based on one or two doubtful citations. Finally, as I believe the last (bibliographical) cite demonstrates fairly conclusively, literate people invariably use "myriad" as a modifier, not a noun.

Whatever, I don't care very much. Except when a "stylist" uses a word he clearly doesn't know how to use; then I refuse to read him because he's a poseur. (And in passisng, I'd bet I could find at least dozen more "Pretentiously incorrect" usages in The Road ... hell, probably in his author bio.


:) BRocket :)

[Colette Jones]

I see you have discovered the internet is great for finding "proof" of a differing view, Bottle Rocket, but you forgot to link to most of your evidence.

I'm not sure why I'm supposed to believe "Online Etymology Dictionary" over Merriam-Webster.

Oh, I see, it's by someone called "Douglas Harper" AND you can email him! Wow. This is great stuff.

An excerpt from his bio:

I got along reasonably well with most kids, but had no friends after school. I came home and read. Just so you don't get the wrong idea, I eventually did make friends, and good ones. I was a varsity swimming captain and got a lush and lovely half-Armenian girlfriend, played in bands, etc. But it took a couple of years, and even after I started adjusting I never stopped reading for pleasure.
It's all about him! Wow, I see why some of you might like this guy.

Here's what the Oxford site says about its dictionary, which you seem to agree with, Bottle Rocket:


The Oxford English Dictionary


The Oxford English Dictionary is the accepted authority on the history and meaning of English words



and here's its dictionary entry for "myriad":



myriad



/mirihttp://www.askoxford.com/images/phonetics/schwa.gifd/ literary
• noun 1 (also myriads) an indefinitely great number. 2 (in classical times) a unit of ten thousand.
• adjective innumerable. — ORIGIN Greek murias, from murioi ‘10,000’.


Mind you, this is the "compact" version. Perhaps they took out the noun bit for their full version.

[Mirabell]

I'm in bed and can't be bothered to hunt up my full-scale OED, but the "noun" usage will post-date the adjectival one by the same degree that Greek predates English. Further, it's is in all likelihood a "new" usage

Wrong. In the link I provided, Wicky quotes the full-scale OED and it agrees. The noun usage is older.

[Refus de Sejour]

The 1989 OED lists "myriad" as both noun and adjective, giving the following examples:

from 1555: "It is a miserable thynge to hear how many myriades of men these. . devourers of mans flesh flesshe haue consumed"

from 1570: "Who can Imagine the Myriades of sundry Cases. .tried and concluded by the forenamed Rules, onely?"

It also quotes a couple of hacks by the name of Tennyson and Coleridge, the former with "That codeless myriad of precedent" (1864) and "like a myriad of tubes" (1875), the latter really piling it on with "Myriad myriads of lives teem'd forth from the mighty embracements" (1800).

Considering the above, is it not faintly possible that McCarthy does know how to use the word, and used it here correctly?

:D

(BTW, that 1555 writer should get his ass kicked for leaving out the apostrophe! And as for his spelling.... :mad: :mad:)

[Colette Jones]

Indeed, I can't easily find sites which exclude the noun, except for that one the eminent Douglas Harper wrote.

Whatever, I don't care very much. Except when a "stylist" uses a word he clearly doesn't know how to use; then I refuse to read him because he's a poseur. (And in passisng, I'd bet I could find at least dozen more "Pretentiously incorrect" usages in The Road ... hell, probably in his author bio.
Go for it, Bottle Rocket.

[Bjorn]

It also quotes a couple of hacks by the name of Tennyson and Coleridge, the former with "That codeless myriad of precedent" (1864) and "like a myriad of tubes" (1875)
Tennyson knew about the Internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes)?

[Igu Soni]

Tennyson knew about the Internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes)?
Good sf is always welcome.

[Bubba]

More to the point, "myriad" is a "dazzle'em'rubes" kind of word, useful maybe for a pastiche of Pericles-meets-Corneille. Among its cousins are "oenophile," "paraphiliac," "rebarbatitive," etc etc. All words which would almost certainly be better replaced with their common-or-garden meanings. There is, IMHO, no case in which "myriad" is an improvement over "countless" -- but that's just my opinion.

However, I hold this opinion so dear, and have so taken to heart the excerpts of CMcC here posted, as well as the reviews, it will be a very long time before I bother with his work. IN MY OPINION: his style is over-the-top pretentious, and he doesn't strike me as having anything to say that hasn't been said earlier and better. It really isn't worth disagreeing with me, not that I would mind; IMHO I just have many other better things to do with my time.


:) BRocket :)

I must confess I use "rebarbative" fairly often. In my line of work, it's a handy word: I use it on those rare instances I heed my better my judgment, when I would really rather say: "Reading your work, Sir (or Madam), is like wading through shit." "Rebarbative" seems more polite.

"Inexorably" is perhaps another of these words that get used in contemporary prose only to impress the impressionable. Inexorably, my ass!

Correct or not, the use of "a myriad of" by contemporary prose writers is, to my mind, off-putting and lazy. I no longer take seriously the writer who uses the phrase--nor could I really trust the judgment (in things literary) of anyone who fails to see why I object to it.

[Igu Soni]

I must confess I use "rebarbative" fairly often. In my line of work, it's a handy word: I use it on those rare instances I heed my better my judgment, when I would really rather say: "Reading your work, Sir (or Madam), is like wading through shit." "Rebarbative" seems more polite.

"Inexorably" is perhaps another of these words that get used in contemporary prose only to impress the impressionable. Inexorably, my ass!

Correct or not, the use of "a myriad of" by contemporary prose writers is, to my mind, off-putting and lazy. I no longer take seriously the writer who uses the phrase--nor could I really trust the judgment (in things literary) of anyone who fails to see why I object to it.
Language evolves. What was once dazzle'em'rubes is fairly common to me, a mere eighteen-year-old. All three words come perfectly naturally to me. In the forms aove described.

[Colette Jones]

"Inexorably" is perhaps another of these words that get used in contemporary prose only to impress the impressionable.
Really? You've got some funny ideas about words, Bubba.

Correct or not, the use of "a myriad of" by contemporary prose writers is, to my mind, off-putting and lazy. I no longer take seriously the writer who uses the phrase--nor could I really trust the judgment (in things literary) of anyone who fails to see why I object to it.
... he says, inexorably.

You trust Bottle Rocket's judgement only, then. That should be great fun, hanging out on a literature forum which has many members, but only trusting one other person's judgement.

[Refus de Sejour]

Tennyson knew about the Internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes)?

Coleridge's "Myriad myriad" is my favourite... that guy clearly needed a good editor :D.

[Mirabell]

Coleridge's "Myriad myriad" is my favourite... that guy clearly needed a good editor :D.


Coleridge, and Twain, too, off-putting and lazy, the lot.

[Refus de Sejour]

On second thoughts, considering the valid objections made in this thread to the use of the phrase "myriad of," I suggest that all occurrences of this phrase be edited as follows (using McCarthy's text as an example):



the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a shitload of eyes winking across the desert floor.

[Mirabell]

On second thoughts, considering the valid objections made in this thread to the use of the phrase "myriad of," I suggest that all occurrences of this phrase be edited as follows (using McCarthy's text as an example):


I have a fondness for you, young sir.

[waalkwriter]

What's wrong with the word inexorably? That's never struck me as a word that comes off as pretentious. Of course this is coming from someone who can hardly go a day without saying, "ostensibly". Loquacious, though a good word is one that I often encounter used in a way that seems show-offy, but I'd be hard-pressed to agree to universally decrying any word as a pretentious, I mean words are only how they're used, kind of why I'm not to keen on extreme political correctness, attacking people for using offensive words for realism or for using in them ways that are not implying anything offensive. I don't think it's right to add meaning to a word independently of how it's used.

though how we got into all this on a thread about Cormac McCarthy, or C-Mac as e-joseph termed him, eludes me.

[Bottle Rocket]

Never let it be said that I am unwilling to bow to overwhelming opinion. (Tuttavia, si muove)

I do suggest that those still interested in the "literate" as opposed to "legal" use of "myriad" consult this (http://www.springerlink.com/content/?k=myriad) bibliographical list

I add this (http://www.wordnik.com/words/myriad) as well; noun is 3rd definition; more to the point, in two pages worth of examples, not a single one uses any but the adjectival form.

This (http://anwulf.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E60F1A35F46EF554!991.entry),though, is my favorite.

However, corrected though I be, I maintain my position that "a myriad of" is still a barbarous, pretentious usage (albeit technically correct), with the "a" and the "of" multiplying the pretention in myriad ways.



Myriad ways to say it
Green Bamboo's Blog - Windows Live (http://anwulf.spaces.live.com/blog/)

I'm feeling a wee bit trivial as everybody else argues about the election or the economy and I slog along minding our language. All I can say in my defense is that readers continue to show an interest. For example, this just in, from a reader named Wanda Lee:

YES! I have a language question! Mine is something that grates like chalk on a blackboard when I read it--but if editors at publishing companies don't correct it I figure I must be the one in the wrong. Please straighten this out for me.

"Myriad" or "a myriad of"? I've always considered "myriad" itself to mean the same as "a lot of," but now it seems either usage is OK with publishers. "A myriad of" reads to me the same as "a a lot of of" or "a many of of." To tell you the truth, I hope I'm wrong so I can get over it annoying me so because I think it's here to stay!

Thank you for a service that is so helpful--to some of us.

Wanda, just as you hoped ...

The "myriad" you like is a perfectly good adjective, as in this snippet from the Iowa City Press-Citizen:
Brian Flaherty, chairman of the Johnson County Democratic Party, ... added that myriad issues from health care to the war in Iraq to the nation's standing in the world have inspired people to volunteer.

But the word is also a perfectly good noun, as in this recent AP story:
A sampling of presidential campaign-oriented direct mail from some of the battlegrounds reveals a myriad of messages.

Or this from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
It's difficult to tell how large the Obama or McCain campaigns' online networks are -- or how many e-mail addresses either have gathered.

But for Washington voters, that combined with a competitive gubernatorial race and a myriad of other hotly contested races and ballot measures could mean a lot of extra lunchtime reading -- or a lot of deleting.

(Well, yes, those bits are from political news -- language is relevant to everything!)
In fact, the noun came first, appearing in texts from the mid 1500s, whereas the adjective wasn't invented until almost 200 years later. And -- get this -- originally it meant 10,000 of anything, especially soldiers. So if an enemy force decimated a myriad ... Who wants to do the math?

Wanda, may I suggest you start thinking of "myriad" as roughly synonymous with both "numerous" and "a number of" or "plentiful" and "plenty of"?




Wanda, may I add that you will never err if you use "numerous." "plentiful," or "a really lot of" in lieu of "myriad"? (and everyone else, may I add that neither the noun nor the adjective were "invented" in English, the noun was (wrongly) adopted from Greek, so citing it is a bit like citing a first use for "javelin" or "trilogy"





Finally, a NYTimes article which discusses a number of these issues (not "myriad" but the whole "direct" versus "baroque" argument as it affects modern writing. For those curious about it, the final paragraph lists authors felt by the essayist to fall into the more-or-less "purple" category; it may come as little surprise that few of them interest me and NONE would number among my top 25 Favorites. I recognize that Faulkner is a great author, but for my money that's in spite of, not because of, his logorhhea.For the rest (excepting only Dylan Thomas and then only the DT of "A Child's Christmas in Wales"), these names elicit from me only a collective 'meh!" (I note in passing, also, that these are writers whose purplitude is justified by the substance of their work. For every one of them, myriad others paint themselves purple but have nothing to say)

And need I observe that Cormac MCCarthy didn't make the Times cut?

Whatever, it's all just a matter of taste anyway.


:) BRocket :)

Finally, when I get bored enough I'll do my hatchet job on McCarthy's language, but I'll have to fast for a while so I have nothing to puke up.

[Mirabell]

I add this (http://www.wordnik.com/words/myriad) as well; noun is 3rd definition; more to the point, in two pages worth of examples, not a single one uses any but the adjectival form.



This linguistic comment, from the page you yourself cite


Throughout most of its history in English myriad was used as a noun, as in a myriad of men. In the 19th century it began to be used in poetry as an adjective, as in myriad men. Both usages in English are acceptable, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Myriad myriads of lives.” This poetic, adjectival use became so well entrenched generally that many people came to consider it as the only correct use.and, in case you suddenly went blind, this example of noun usage, from the page you yourself cite


Thou seest, brother, how many thousands, or rather how many myriads, that is, ten thousands, of the Jews there are which believe. and one definition that has three entries, only one of which is the adjective, from the page you yourself cite




noun The number of ten thousand; ten thousand persons or things.
noun An immense number; a very great many; an indefinitely large number.
adjective Consisting of a very great, but indefinite, number.



barbarousas in "barbarous like Twain, Coleridge, Tennyson", yes?
In fact, since the very noun use is barbarous, yes? You mean, barbarous like (glancing over the OED http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00320201?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=myriad&first=1&max_to_show=10 (but then, it's probably not as great as randomly cited webpages)) Mark Twain, Southey, Tennyson, Longfellow, Pope, William Owen, Thomas Parnell, Cowper, Milton, and the Duke of Wellington, yes? A refreshing use of "barbarous" and good luck with that. To me, it seems good company

[Colette Jones]

...though how we got into all this on a thread about Cormac McCarthy, or C-Mac as e-joseph termed him, eludes me.
Bottle Rocket and Bubba are trying to show how much more they know about words than the rest of us, and they failed miserably. They don't like that, so it goes on ad infinitum.

When enough people use forums primarily to show how clever they are, most threads will go off course. "Enough" is a very small number where forums are concerned.

[lenz]

Bottle Rocket and Bubba are trying to show how much more they know about words than the rest of us, and they failed miserably. They don't like that, so it goes on ad infinitum.

When enough people use forums primarily to show how clever they are, most threads will go off course. "Enough" is a very small number where forums are concerned.

Perhaps there should be a thread, or six, where those who wish to carry on these arguments, or whatever they are, may do so. Such threads should be marked with a warning for those with allergies.

[Liam]

Perhaps there should be a thread, or six, where those who wish to carry on these arguments, or whatever they are, may do so.I have a perfect name for such a thread--the Sandbox. "Parents are advised to wait outside while the children play."


I, of course, would be a regular.

[Heteronym]

To Heteronym's original point:
I've already elucidated this in some other thread, but I honestly feel that the humour you look for in books, thanks to the Kundera crit book you read, can be replaced by human-ness. As long as it isn't completely negative in its flow. The Roadhas the relationship to help lighten the mood, which I think makes it fine on that count.

But humor is part of humaness, of our human existence. I wrote it before: the characters can go on being miserable and hopeless; but there's another voice in the novel, the one from the narrator, who doesn't feel cold or hunger, who isn't emotionally attached to the boy. And yet it's as miserable as if it were in the action.

I much prefer the playful sadism of Milan Kundera, who looks at his characters from a distance and revels in twisting the knife in the wound a bit more, but with irony, with sarcasm, because he knows it's just a novel, and they're not real, and it doesn't matter in the end.

[Igu Soni]

But humor is part of humaness, of our human existence. I wrote it before: the characters can go on being miserable and hopeless; but there's another voice in the novel, the one from the narrator, who doesn't feel cold or hunger, who isn't emotionally attached to the boy. And yet it's as miserable as if it were in the action.

I much prefer the playful sadism of Milan Kundera, who looks at his characters from a distance and revels in twisting the knife in the wound a bit more, but with irony, with sarcasm, because he knows it's just a novel, and they're not real, and it doesn't matter in the end.

I understand it as a preference (I probably stand with you there), but I think we have to be more careful when there's wording as strong as yours involved, if you don't mind me saying so.
As you say, 'humour is part of humanness'. But humanness is not part of humour. Humanness, I'd say, can exist even in an absence of humour.
Take Waiting for the Barbarians for example, a book I know you admire as much as I do. It's rather depressing, but it's not in the least funny. But, we love it. Why? Because it has humanness, in the character of the magistrate.
About the specific voice of The Road, I feel that it is very common for the third-person-specific-person's-POV narrator's tone to mirror the feelings of the character, because that's how literature best communicates with us, right? Via tone? Kundera and McCarthy have different purposes here, and (obviously) it manifests itself in tone.

[Stiffelio]

But humor is part of humaness, of our human existence. I wrote it before: the characters can go on being miserable and hopeless; but there's another voice in the novel, the one from the narrator, who doesn't feel cold or hunger, who isn't emotionally attached to the boy. And yet it's as miserable as if it were in the action.

I much prefer the playful sadism of Milan Kundera, who looks at his characters from a distance and revels in twisting the knife in the wound a bit more, but with irony, with sarcasm, because he knows it's just a novel, and they're not real, and it doesn't matter in the end.


It's a matter of taste and perception and what really get's to each individual reader's heart. Since you mentioned Kundera, I must say my perception reading him was that he was cerebral, self-conscious and his sardonic humor ceased to impress me after a while. I loved Immortality because it was the first book by Kundera I read and I thought he was original. But then when I read other books of his I realized they were all very similar, formulaic, author-intrusive and ultimately boring. I could perhaps admire Kundera but he doen't move me; his is a kind of writing that shows all the stitches. McCarthy, on the other hand, touches my heart. Minimalistic or verbose, humorous or not (his dead-pan dialogues are seasoned with understated humor IMO), warts and all, his writing carries raw emotion across to the reader.

[Heteronym]

Take Waiting for the Barbarians for example, a book I know you admire as much as I do. It's rather depressing, but it's not in the least funny. But, we love it. Why? Because it has humanness, in the character of the magistrate.

This novel is full of humor. It's not laugh out loud humor, though. It's there in the ironic view of the life in the village, destroyed by its own fears, in the Magistrate's reversal of fortune, from an important man to a fool mocked by his own people back to a leader.

[Heteronym]

It's a matter of taste and perception and what really get's to each individual reader's heart. Since you mentioned Kundera, I must say my perception reading him was that he was cerebral, self-conscious and his sardonic humor ceased to impress me after a while.

We won't see eye to eye on this; you've listed many of the characteristics that I love in Kundera.


I could perhaps admire Kundera but he doen't move me; his is a kind of writing that shows all the stitches. McCarthy, on the other hand, touches my heart. Minimalistic or verbose, humorous or not (his dead-pan dialogues are seasoned with understated humor IMO), warts and all, his writing carries raw emotion across to the reader.

But he doesn't want to move you. His sardonic humor, his distance, is there so he won't move the readers, which only makes it a bigger accomplishment when he does. Kundera doesn't believe in tragedy. He doesn't write solemn scenes like the ending of The Road. He realises the falseness of that. His humor is always present to undermine any possibility of tragedy. Tragedy is easy to write and is for hack writers who don't know how else to capture the reader's attention.

[DB Cooper]

I havent read the entire thread, so Im not sure if its been mentioned but has anyone noticed the amount of different covers for this book? Its truly staggering.

[Bubba]

All right, am reviving this thread that has lain dormant lo these many weeks not to start a new eruption but to say that, confounding all my expectations (see upthread), I came across two instances of "myriad of" at work this week and in neither instance did I, as I said I would, edit out the offending "myriad." In one, I merely got rid of the "a" and the "of" and made "myriad" an adjective rather than a noun. In the other ("the myriad of investment funds," believe it or not; I mean, good God! The "myriad of investment funds"! What was the guy thinking? Why not the "myriad" of pustular zits or, slightly more banal, the "myriad" of paper clips lying in the desk drawer? The "myriad" of unwashed dishes in the sink?), I left a comment for the writer, whose first drafts are about 95% gibberish: "Better, perhaps, to master the rudiments of the English language before trying out fancy words like 'myriad.'"

It's little wonder, I guess, that "my" writers so often go behind my back to complain to my manager about my cruelty!

[waalkwriter]

We won't see eye to eye on this; you've listed many of the characteristics that I love in Kundera.



But he doesn't want to move you. His sardonic humor, his distance, is there so he won't move the readers, which only makes it a bigger accomplishment when he does. Kundera doesn't believe in tragedy. He doesn't write solemn scenes like the ending of The Road. He realises the falseness of that. His humor is always present to undermine any possibility of tragedy. Tragedy is easy to write and is for hack writers who don't know how else to capture the reader's attention.

I disagree. With everything you said, as much as a person can possibly disagree. I take reading very seriously and very literally; of course its not real but the writer is not supposed to let on to that; he's to tell a story as if it is real. I'm a very serious person, I like humor; in fact I like Diana Wynne Jones more witty, comical novels, but I like utmost seriousness in style. Partially the reason I've never liked wordplay, even as a child, even in Roald Dahl books persay. The writing should not be playful, even if what it's talking about is humorous, it's like having a clown at a funeral.

I'd also disagree with stifellio, my problem with McCarthy is that writing is dreary and lifeless; he's a minimalist in the sense that his writing doesn't directly display emotion, it describes it impassionately, and I cannot tolerate it.

I personally just find the people who don't take literature seriously enough to give it this basic respect disagreeable, its the basic reason I hate post-modernists. For me a work of literature isn't something to snicker at, to pass an empty afternoon admiring; it's something to get away from the world. I'm maddening critic, I see only the flaws in people, things, the world, I hate it with a passion and such a passion that the only relief is to find a work of fiction where the flaws of reality are not visible. It's an integral part of how I keep going, so I tend to just lose it when people suggest this vital, precious thing to me is a mere farce, a game of words and what not.

The fact that this is absolutely correct is beside the point; its a game you play without acknowledging, the whole point is not to acknowledge this.

Art is the only thing I can take at face value, the only thing I am capable of accepting and admiring for only what it is. I am very passionate in fighting against this corrupting influence of intelligent, unemotional, and bored postmodernists in all forms of art; because it's the only buffer between the deepest and darkest pits of nihilism for me. It's why I am just baffled at people who enjoy Pynchon, who find Barthelme interesting, who Barth worthwhile.

[Raphael Lambach]

Everyone knows on this site how much I like this book and its author. Watch its big screem adaptation is really good, and I'm looking forward to buy this DVD as soon as it's released at Brazil.*****

[Stiffelio]

Everyone knows on this site how much I like this book and its author. Watch its big screem adaptation is really good, and I'm looking forward to buy this DVD as soon as it's released at Brazil.*****


I didn't know, but now I do and I'm glad you loved it; so did I :)

[Heteronym]

I disagree. With everything you said, as much as a person can possibly disagree. I take reading very seriously and very literally; of course its not real but the writer is not supposed to let on to that; he's to tell a story as if it is real. I'm a very serious person, I like humor; in fact I like Diana Wynne Jones more witty, comical novels, but I like utmost seriousness in style. Partially the reason I've never liked wordplay, even as a child, even in Roald Dahl books persay. The writing should not be playful, even if what it's talking about is humorous, it's like having a clown at a funeral.

That's a pity, because at the end of the day most writers, and not just post-modernists, from centuries ago to now, have valued form and style over content. Writers who value content should be writing pamphlets. If getting across mere ideas is all that matters, surely that's a better outlet. Why bother invent characters, plot, dialogue, backgrounds, when a writer can just quickly and concisely organize his ideas in a pamphlet?

I don't know how to say this to you, but novels are frivolous and worthless in themselves. There's nothing sillier than grown men inventing stuff. Most novels deal with themes that aren't even worthy of a column in a newspaper. Everything that makes them important is how they're written. The wordplay, the style.

[waalkwriter]

That's a pity, because at the end of the day most writers, and not just post-modernists, from centuries ago to now, have valued form and style over content. Writers who value content should be writing pamphlets. If getting across mere ideas is all that matters, surely that's a better outlet. Why bother invent characters, plot, dialogue, backgrounds, when a writer can just quickly and concisely organize his ideas in a pamphlet?

I don't know how to say this to you, but novels are frivolous and worthless in themselves. There's nothing sillier than grown men inventing stuff. Most novels deal with themes that aren't even worthy of a column in a newspaper. Everything that makes them important is how they're written. The wordplay, the style.


That's borderline ridiculousness. You clearly don't have a clue what I'm saying. All I care about are inventing characters, plot, backgrounds and dialogue, and nothing about the "ideas' behind a novel. I said story is all that matters, not ideas.

And you know what, all of life is utterly meaningless, a chance existence. The only thing we have to do with our lives is to invent stuff, and so I find there is nothing "silly" about that. Nothing in wordplay is what makes a novel important, the only thing that makes a novel important is the story, how it touches the reader and the reaction that it invokes.

And no real novel could be described in newspaper column; it's not possible to do one justice, you could list ideas but that would miss the point. For to read a good book is an experience which doesn't lend itself to being described in words other than being pinned down in generalities of expression.

People have to have something to deal with the pathetic and meaningless monotony of their lives. Some take to religion, some take to absolute sarcasm, (and they tend to like such "silly" and truly frivolous wordplay that you try to say is the only worthwhile thing when it is merely a pathetic trapping of trying too hard and being a failure, creatively), and some take to work, still others take to the idea and the escape of art and most of those aren't attracted by the trappings, by going to a book and reading, "Oh cool he named that character Zeitsuss, how fucking clever of him", or "Oh god his style of writing gives me orgasms" or "Man, that director's use of camera angles is amazing," no its the story, none of the rest is worth a shit if the story doesn't speak to someone, in fact they're ways of covering up the fact that those stories don't have shit to say to us.

And yeah, that statement pissed me off pretty badly so this comment is harsh.

[Liam]

Hmm, this is a tough one.

I'd have to say, I think that both of you are right. Literature is nothing without a story, but how you tell that story is hugely important, otherwise all novels and poems would be the same, and who'd give a rat's ass anyway?

What the prehistoric cave-painters wanted to capture, for instance, was the elemental movement of the herds of buffalo and other forms of life across the endless vistas and plains which they inhabited. But even in those "primitive" cave paintings you can observe the basic human need to aesthetisize the experience, any experience, in order to turn it into a work of art.

But I agree with WaalkWriter too, in that even the most gorgeously constructed aesthetic object in the world cannot equal the pure jolt of a basic human experience. (Take sex, for example. You can try to describe it "properly" till kingdom come, but there's nothing like the real thing, dude, nothing at all).

[waalkwriter]

You make a good point Liam. I didn't mean by what I said that how the story was told was unimportant, but i tend to distinguish the two; I consider it merely a result of trying to tell the story well and tell it honestly. I certainly understand what you're saying, there have been many films that I've felt had good stories, but were not well executed. Like I said though, I tend to distinguish between that and stylism, what heteronym was going on about, or of making the style important rather than the story.

[Refus de Sejour]

What?? This "debate" has invaded the Road thread again?? Guys, out of courtesy to those who might want to discuss the actual book mentioned in the thread title, take it elsewhere: Waalkwriter's "Aesthetic philosophy" thread is still open.

[Bjorn]

What?? This "debate" has invaded the Road thread again?? Guys, out of courtesy to those who might want to discuss the actual book mentioned in the thread title, take it elsewhere: Waalkwriter's "Aesthetic philosophy" thread is still open.
Seconded.

http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/general-chat/30278-what-your-aesthetic-philosophy.html

[Raphael Lambach]

I didn't know, but now I do and I'm glad you loved it; so did I :)
What did you think 'bout movie adaptation?

[waalkwriter]

What did you think 'bout movie adaptation?

Is that out already? I must have missed it somehow.

[Raphael Lambach]

Is that out already? I must have missed it somehow.

Yes I was already released.. If I'm not wrong at Jan or Feb. In Brazil it was out at april, however I've never seen DVDs copies or have heard about them.

I am pretty sure it is available to watch onlie. Google "watch The Road online" and you're gonna get a link to do.

[Stiffelio]

What did you think 'bout movie adaptation?


I have the DVd but I haven't yet seen it, on purpose. The novel hit me very hard and so I wanted to let some time pass before I watch the movie. I'm told, however, that it wasn't nearly as good as the book.

[DB Cooper]

Getting off the subject of The Road for a bit, does anyone have word on a release date for McCarthy's next novel. From what Ive heard its set in New Orleans, in the 1970's, and mainly deals with a suicide that happens in the beginning of the book and all of the fallout and ramifications of that act. Also noteworthy is that this is the first time that Cormac uses a female protagonist. When asked why he said something to the effect of "well I thought it was about time I tried that". Im sure hes well aware of the criticism of his poor handling of female characters, and it appears he is ready to take the challenge. Sorry if this was mentioned earlier in the thread but I read The Road a few years ago and I wasnt really interested in rehashing that book for pages upon pages, especially considering its not among his strongest books. So anyone with info please share!

[Liam]

So anyone with info please share!Um, does it have the working title The Passenger? I think it's going to be years (well, maybe not) till he publishes it; he's not exactly churning out books at the rate of Danielle Steel, :).

[DB Cooper]

Um, does it have the working title The Passenger? I think it's going to be years (well, maybe not) till he publishes it; he's not exactly churning out books at the rate of Danielle Steel, :).

Yep, thats the title. I got the info from an interview he did with The Wall Street Journal, of all things. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html

From the sound of it hes fairly far along in the process, so Im hoping it comes out within a year. This may be his last book, hopefully not, but hes not exactly a youngster. And on yet another unrelated (to The Road) note, I REALLY REALLY hope Pynchon has one more book left in him.

[pesahson]

While browsing through comments on amazon.com for The Road, I stumbled upon this review: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2O8EWYACH712D/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0015LUVWA&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode=#wasThisHelpful

I still haven't decided whether to get this book but I thought you might enjoy this quite entertaining review. :)

[Heteronym]

That review is hilarious and pretty accurate. The only downside is that, in order to truly appreciate its wit, you have to trudge through that horrorible novel first.

[Liam]

Glad to see I'm not the only one giving McCarthy a pass, :cool:.

[Stiffelio]

I wasn't going to pay attention to that review, but since I keep reading continuous bashing of McCarthy here I decided to read it. It's a PATHETIC review, from a sick and envious person. Some people just cannot forgive McCarthy for having written a novel in a completely different style from his previous work and yet spinning out another masterpiece. Pesahson: read the novel and judge for yourself

[Heteronym]

I wasn't going to pay attention to that review, but since I keep reading continuous bashing of McCarthy here I decided to read it. It's a PATHETIC review, from a sick and envious person.

I wonder, when Jonathan Swift was taking the piss out of Daniel Defoe, or when Ezra Pound mocked A.E. Housman's poetry, were they also just sick, envious people? This review is great satire. It captures the style McCarthy used and exaggerates it to show its underlying silliness. Just the way satire works.


Some people just cannot forgive McCarthy for having written a novel in a completely different style from his previous work and yet spinning out another masterpiece. Pesahson: read the novel and judge for yourself

I read the novel he wrote before this one, and I found it garbage too. Mirabell, who is a fan, just started a thread on it and argues it's not that great either. So I'm feeling pretty validated here. And it's not the style, it's the fact it has no content. It's just a string of post-apocalyptic clichés from better novels and movies. And the human story isn't that great either: yes, the father is tireless in his love for his son. We get it. What else?

[Heteronym]

Few writers dare investigate the dark side of human nature.

:D

That's... wow, I don't even... I mean...

:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D :D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D :D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D :D:D:D

:confused:

What does Cormac McCarthy know at all about the dark side of human nature? The son of a lawyer, who attended college, and has had the luck of living in one of the richest and most peaceful countries in the world?

What does he know, for instance, about the pain of seeing his country invaded, like Milan Kundera? What does he know about his people being exterminated, like Primo Levi? Has he ever experienced the fear that at any moment the secret police could just make him disappear, like Mikhail Bulgakov must have felt? Does he know what it is to live under police protection, like Salman Rushdie? Has he ever been stabbed in the throat by a fanatic, like Naguib Mahfouz? Did he nearly face a shooting squad, like Dostoevsky? Has he ever been censored by a government like José Saramago?

Who is this insignificant little man, this preachy little man with a biblical tone as if he were Moses shouting the commandments of God at his people from Mount Sinai, to tell me anything at all about the dark side of human nature?

If you don't regularly read books about the super-duper dark side of human nature, that's your problem! Change your reading habits then. But don't say McCarthy is in some special category above other writers. It's not that other writers don't investigate the DSoHN, it's that they're mature enough not to take it too seriously. McCarthy is like the sullen, egocentric teenager who takes pride in being a nihilist and reads too much Sartre. He fools impressionable minds with his solemnity. But it's easy to be solemn. Real talent is making someone laugh at police brutality, like Dario Fo does; or at totalitarian governments, like Saramago does; or at the horrors of war, like Curzio Malaparte does; or at terrorism and religious fundamentalism, like Salman Rushdie does.

Little Cormac will have to grow up a lot before he can be in their league.

[Mirabell]

Do not judge McCarthy by his pitiful performance in No country... and The Road. Blood Meridian and Suttree are magnificent works of fiction, but he took a long break before beginning to write again and what he's produced since is truly ridiculous (although my own review of No country... may not have been as harsh as it could/should have been)

[Rumpelstilzchen]

Do not judge McCarthy by his pitiful performance in No country... and The Road. Blood Meridian and Suttree are magnificent works of fiction, but he took a long break before beginning to write again and what he's produced since is truly ridiculous (although my own review of No country... may not have been as harsh as it could/should have been)

I think your review is perfectly fine and one should not be more negative about No country... It is not a bad book, neither is The Road.

[Liam]

McCarthy has the ability to take off the rose-tinted glasses...I don't think that Heteronym is saying that he doesn't have that ability. The original issue was that the author borrows every post-apocalyptic cliche in the book in order to do so; and if this book didn't have McCarthy's name on it, what are the chances it would even get published? Suddenly, however, it's being picked up by Oprah and claimed as one of the greatest novels of the new century. Give me a break.

[Rumpelstilzchen]

I am really looking forward to McCarthy getting the Nobel prize in the near future, which would be well-deserved no doubt. All hell will break loose in this forum. I have just skimmed this thread for a while and I really have to say that there does not seem to be another author under discussion in this forum that is as fiercely and often ridiculously debated. I would like to hear the opinion of a psychologist on the question why certain people are getting so aggressive about this particular author or particular books of this author.

[Liam]

I think The Road is an improvement over, say, The War of the Worlds.I hope to god you mean the film and not the original novel.

As a small aside, have you seen Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Delicatessen (1991)? Now there's a post-apocalyptic scenario that may just... come about, :).

[Rumpelstilzchen]

What does Cormac McCarthy know at all about the dark side of human nature? The son of a lawyer, who attended college, and has had the luck of living in one of the richest and most peaceful countries in the world?


Ever heard of the possibility to read up on topics you did not have the opportunity to experience first hand?? Or watch films about it? Or talk to people that experienced it? Or to use you imagination, your brain, your empathy or your eyes?

It is enough to go to the next football match and you will learn a lot about how apparently civilized people become animals... :)

[Liam]

...wincing... when I read most fiction, including your beloved Marilynne Robinson.Oh Paul. What are we going to do with you, :rolleyes:.

[Rumpelstilzchen]

I've seen two film versions. My point is that there are no Martians, and most apocalyptic stories are full of such inaccuracies. Although McCarthy is not a great stylist, I was able to get through The Road fully engaged as a reader and without any wincing, as happens when I read most fiction, including your beloved Marilynne Robinson.

This is a bit off topic but I do not think that Wells cared about if Martians exist or not. That's not the point of the book. Could have been any life-form, totally unimportant. The purpose was just to show that mankind might not be the peak of evolution and to show the people where to stick their arrogance and hybris. It is not supposed to be taken literally, so this comparison with The Road is lacking in my opinion. Well this is true for the book. Concerning films: these days we know that there are no Martians, so one should better take a different origin for the aliens of course just to make the story more plausible.

But I have to agree with you that The Road is overall very convincing as a realistic apocalyptic scenario. The cannibalism part with humans locked into the cellar is the only unbelievable thing, though, it is just meant to shock people. There is no point in locking people into the cellar and then cut off some parts from time to time. Have you ever seen anyone doing this with animals? No, right? Why? Because there are ways of making the meat durable and it makes much more sense to kill the animal in one go.

[Heteronym]

I'm afraid that you're the one who needs to brush up on human nature if you think that psychosis and apocalyptic anarchy are the proper subjects of satirical novels.

You never read José Saramago's Blindness.

You see, that's exactly the type of solemn mentality that has to be combated! "Oh, no, someone is making fun of serious things!" Yeah, man I think every topic is approppriate for satire. Keep your little scale of values to yourself. I just love writers who trivialize serious topics. Point me to a comedy about the Holocaust and I'll read it.

[Rumpelstilzchen]

Regarding Martians, I think Wells and other science fiction writers have been extremely presumptuous about what technologically advanced life forms elsewhere in the universe might or might not do. We don't really know anything except that if they exist they probably came into existence through an evolutionary process. In other respects they might be completely different from us. This aspect of science fiction annoys me - much of it is in the same vein as taking an ordinary story about ordinary people and rewriting it with the characters as talking rabbits or robots instead of people. It is possible that some day aliens could invade Earth, but if I had to put a probability on it, it would be infinitesimally small. Most science fiction is completely anthropomorphic.


But that is exactly my point. In case of Wells all of the Alien stuff is just a literary device to bring across some message. It is not supposed to be a about how alien life forms could look like. That is completely different from most of the crap science fiction that came later and was influenced by Wells, pratically all of the American SF for example, they just did not get the point about what Wells wanted to say. One of the few exceptional authors who was really aware of this and also critized it like you was Lem.

[Rumpelstilzchen]

I suppose the use of allegory in science fiction is a way of transmitting ideas to wide audiences. One of my favorite childhood episodes of The Twilight Zone was "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," in which an invasion by aliens is an allegory for a communist takeover (I didn't get it at the time). However, I now tend to see allegories as lessons for dummies who don't read essays: essays are an efficient and precise medium for transmitting ideas, so why not write an essay instead?

If it is only about the lesson, then yes, might better work as an essay. But in general the fictionalized way of presenting topics has also some pros. In the end it is a matter of taste and of which aspects you want to emphasize. Essays are not the literary form for reaching the masses, though.