Style vs. Story -- an essay

Jackson Pollock,

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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.

Cities of the Plain -- A Review

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   Cormac McCarthy writes like I would like to write. Spare and strong. And this from the person who always says she doesn’t like Hemingway. By-the-bye, I do like Hemingway’s short fiction. And I can’t read McCarthy one after the other without the respite of other books. Even if you know nothing about the books before you start them, you soon get a sense of the despair and desolation that reviewers talk about. The sense that these people and their way of life are passing away.

   The first book of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is All the Pretty Horses which introduces us to 16-year-old John Grady Cole who’s lost his grandfather and the ranch home he’s grown up on. It begins in 1949. Rather than move into town he crosses the border into Mexico and comes of age.

   In The Crossing we meet Billy Parham, the son of a rancher, at the beginning of and during World War II. Again we have a young man losing his family and his way of life. He can’t even get into the military and go off to war, the standard border between the way life was and the way it will be for most Americans during that time.

   In Cities of the Plain we’ve come to the last of the three books. Here John Grady and Billy are working on Mac McGovern’s ranch in the early 1950’s. A ranch destined to be bought by the government.

   McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is magnificent just as is the country where it takes place. Great distances filled with sky and earth, hot or cold sunshine and vast night. There aren’t that many people and the people who are there are as spare and hard as the country, as are their language and their relationships.

   This is a conversation between John Grady and Mac McGovern, the rancher he works for.

   John Grady listened to him going down the hall to his room. When he came back he sat down and placed a gold ring on the table.

   That’s been in my dresser drawer for three years. It aint doin nobody any good there and it never will. We talked about everthing and we talked about that ring. She didnt want it put in the ground. I want you to take it.

   Sir I dont think I can do that.

   Yes you can. I’ve already thought of everthing you could possibly say on the subject so rather than go over it item by item let’s just save the aggravation and you put it in your pocket and come Tuesday you put it on that girl’s finger.

   McCarthy is a poet when he describes this country.

The stars in flood above her. The lower edges of the firmament sawed out into the black shapes of the mountains and the lights of the cities burning on the plain like stars pooled in a lake. She sang to herself softly as she went a song from long ago. The dawn was two hours away. The town one.

   McCarthy knows his people and he loves them. He recognizes the philosophers among the poor and resilient. John Grady comes to a blind musician to ask him to act as godfather for the woman he wants to wed. The old man tells him a story explaining why a dying man in great wisdom, chose his most hated enemy to be his son’s godfather. The story begins this way.

He knew that our enemies by contrast seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. So that a man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him.

   The enemy who became godfather to the man’s son found that he must dedicate his entire life to the son. Because there could never be forgiveness, the enemy could not ‘dislodge’ the man. A friend who had loved him could more easily have thought of his dead friend in comfort and sadness and eased himself under the burden of such a responsibility.

   The Border Trilogy are not comfortable books to read. Like the country, they are beautiful and threaten death. The people who inhabit these books are tough. Their lives are broken and battered by sudden and unforgiving violence. They do not so much survive as endure.

   Do not let your obs-comp grammar ways get between you and these books. There are still people like these – unassuming but not subservient, under-educated but not unknowing, not especially civilized but enlightened. And some are still cowboys.