Style vs. Story -- an essay

Jackson Pollock,

image from westpacificview.com

My husband recently finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. If you’ve been following my blog very long, you know I’m a big fan of those three books. My husband is not only widely read, but well-read so I value his opinion.

The Border Trilogy? He liked them. After he got past McCarthy’s style.

McCarthy does not use standard punctuation. For someone who not only knows the basic rules of punctuation, but respects the role of rules in controlling chaos, this can interrupt the flow of the story.

Much of McCarthy’s stories are in dialogue for which he uses few or no attributions, making it sometimes difficult to know who’s speaking. Again, because the reader may have to go back quite a ways to figure out who’s saying what, the story is interrupted.

McCarthy writes run-on sentences that would give Henry James pause. And yes, by the end of the book, McCarthy the story-teller becomes McCarthy the Philosopher with a capital P.

All this being said, why did my husband like the books? For the same reasons I did. The characters, the setting, and the stories. McCarthy does those three things so well, that many of us readers overlook (and in some instances, overcome) his style.

Not everyone is willing or able to get past a writer’s style to get to the good parts.

How many of us were introduced to Shakespeare in school? And haven’t touched him since.  

How was that introduction made? Through reading. Keeping in mind that Shakespeare wrote plays and poems in the styles of plays and poems. To make things more uncomfortable we were subjected to that form of torture peculiar to traditional English teachers – divvying up the script among students who then read their parts cold. Not only are the students reading their parts unrehearsed, they are reading them in what amounts to a foreign language with which they have little familiarity.

(If you could see me now, you’d see my hands thrown into the air – whether in exasperation or supplication even I can’t tell.)

And Shakespeare’s characters and settings and, best of all, his stories are lost to his style.

Okay, so sometimes you have to do reading differently. Shakespeare, we should watch performed by qualified actors under the tutelage of good directors. There are numerous DVDs available from professionals and wonderful productions by college and high school drama departments throughout the English speaking world.

Charles Dickens is another writer we’re introduced to in school. And seldom, if ever, read again. I very early on discovered that I could follow Charles Dickens if I read him out loud or at least heard him as I read silently. But he wrote for pre-television readers. His wonderful stories were produced chapters at a time in periodicals. People would get the newest installment and gather together in their living room and listen to someone read aloud to them. So, in a way, these are performance pieces, too. Dickens, language sounds like the story he’s telling. He paints pictures with his descriptions and dialogue and even the names he chooses for his characters. We are transported into his stories. If we do not read them in our modern way of reading which is somehow fast – more like we’re watching a movie.

I couldn’t read James Joyce. And I can’t stand being left out. I had to find a way into his stories. Then I discovered his work on audio-books. By a reader who has a slight Irish accent. Of course! Joyce’s stories are all inside his head and he’s Irish. So I experience his stories inside my head. With a slight Irish accent.

 Generally speaking, my husband (and he is not alone in this) is of the opinion that a writer whose style makes the story difficult to read is ostentatious, arrogant, and a waste of the reader’s time. There are too many good stories out there and too little time to read them. Why waste that valuable time reading a writer who is more focused on his style than his story?

     My opinion? I’m still working on Faulkner.

Three Writing Styles

STYLES of Writing SOUNDS & Silence

I have always read a wide variety of material, generally with little discrimination. I was as happy with David McCullough’s histories as with Colleen McCullough’s historical fiction. I eagerly read Charles Dickens and J. K. Rowling. Margaret Atwood and John Lescroart both kept me on tenterhooks.

Now that I, too, write, I am no more choosy about my reading, but I am more analytical. This summer I went from Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, a naval novel set in the early 1800’s. To a repeat reading of Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, Volume One of his epic fantasy The Wheel of Time. To Cormack McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, the first in his Borderland Trilogy. Three very different ways to present sound and silence.

From O’Brian this excerpt:

‘Why does he not fire?’ thought Jack. The Desaix’s bow-chasers had been silent these twenty minutes. Indeed, by now she was in musket-shot, and the people in her bows could easily be told from one another: seamen, marines, officers—one man had a wooden leg. ‘By God, he’s going to riddle us with grape.’
…the Desaix began to yaw. She answered her helm as quickly as a cutter, and in three heartbeats there were her thirty-seven guns coming round to bear. The broadside’s roar and the fall of the Sophie’s main top gallant mast and fore topsail yard came almost together—in the thunder a hail of blocks, odd lengths of rope, splinters, the tremendous clang of a grape-shot striking the Sophie’s bell; and then a silence.

And from Jordan:

The back door creaked as someone outside, or something, tried to push it open. His mouth went dry. A crash shook the door in its frame and lent him speed; he slipped through the window like a hare going to ground, and cowered against the side of the house. Inside the room, wood splintered like thunder.

At first when the trees surrounded him, he took comfort from them. They helped hide him from Whatever the creatures were that had attacked the farm. As he crept through the woods, though, moon shadows shifted, and it began to seem as if the darkness of the forest changed and moved, too. Trees loomed malevolently; branches writhed toward him. He could almost hear the growling chuckles stifled in their throats while they waited for him. The howls of Tam’s pursuers no longer filled the night, but in the silence that replaced them he flinched every time the wind scraped one limb against another. He  hardly dared to breathe for fear he might be heard.

Then I read McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses.

Rawlins stood in the door of the kitchen and studied him.
You look like you been rode hard and put up wet, he said.
They sat at the table and ate. Rawlins leaned back and fished his tobacco out of his shirtpocket.

I keep waitin for you to unload your wagon, he said. I got to go to work here in a few minutes.

I just come up to see you.

What about.

It don’t have to be about something does it?

No. Dont have to. He popped a match on the underside of the table and lit his cigarette and shook out the match and put it in his plate.

I hope you know what you’re doin, he said.

John Grady drained the last of his coffee and put the cup on his plate along with the silver. He got his hat from the bench beside him and put it on and stood up to take his dishes to the sink.

Rawlins watched him go to the sink and watched him go to the door. He thought he might turn and say something else but he didn’t.

It was not the absence of an apostrophe here and there that most affected me about McCarthy’s work. Having just read O’Brian’s decorous and abundant language describing sea battles in the Napoleonic Wars with their hundreds of men crowded on ships amid smoke and thunderous cannon fire, I then read Jordan’s graphic descriptions of combat with fantastical, ravening creatures in a world where silence and darkness battered me as harshly as the sounds of raging battles.

And finally I read McCarthy, with whom I was unfamiliar. My reaction to the change in styles was sensory. I felt as if I had been struck partially deaf. He wrote a world where sounds and people are as spare and sparse as the nearly barren dry lands of the West Texas-Mexico borderlands. McCarthy led me through hot, open country, with few people and them slow to speak their few words. A country of far distances and vast silences.

Three very different writers using words printed on paper to build worlds of sounds and silences in my head.