Wild, Wild Words
On Cormac McCarthy’s legendary prose style
This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic is by Cameron Brooks
I was watering a young maple tree in my front yard one evening, listening to the sonorous voice of Richard Poe narrate the opening chapters of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It had been a hot summer. Thistles and gophers had overtaken our yellow lawn, but I couldn’t give up on the sapling. Also around this time, I was a thousand pages deep into a western novel phase. And one does not undergo a western novel phase without eventually undergoing Cormac McCarthy.
McCarthy’s “western novels” are often seen as modern subversions of the classic American genre. For this reason, I was somewhat reluctant to read Blood Meridian. I’d enjoyed the epic plot of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove; the craggy canyonlands of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage; the moral simplicity of Louis L’Amour’s Hondo. I didn’t want McCarthy spoiling things with his ambiguous cowboys and his nihilism. Like a dutiful English major, though, I was willing to subject myself for the greater good of literature, or whatever.
I was not prepared. By the time I’d rewound my watering hose, I was completely riveted by McCarthy’s language. Vigorous, vivid, lean—his sentences pulsed in my ears with a force I had never before felt in words, a force that seemed at times to overpower the narrative itself:
Now come days of begging, days of theft. Days of riding where there rode no soul save he. He’s left behind the pinewood country and the evening sun declines before him beyond an endless swale and dark falls here like a thunderclap and a cold wind sets the weeds to gnashing. The night sky lies so sprent with stars that there is scarcely space of black at all and they fall all night and it is so that their numbers are no less.
That’s how the second chapter of Blood Meridian begins. Looking up the definition of “sprent,” I listened to the paragraph three, four more times, moved by its lyricism but unsure as to why. So I kept listening, rewinding, jotting things down.
Turns out Blood Meridian is brimming with passages like this one: expansive, rhapsodic depictions of desert landscapes; scenes of war; philosophical pronouncements about the human condition. One puzzling note I made early on was that McCarthy uses the word “and” a lot, stringing together his sentences with that conjunction where we might normally expect commas. This literary device, known as polysyndeton, imbues McCarthy’s voice with the powerful cadence we feel in the paragraph above, especially when juxtaposed with the book’s plainspoken cowboy dialogue.
Famous for his sparse use of punctuation, McCarthy’s syntax is often replete with repetitive and otherwise superfluous words. Perhaps my favorite example is found in The Crossing, another of his novels set in the American southwest:
He slept and as he slept he dreamt and the dream was of his father and in the dream his father was afoot and lost in the desert. In the dying light of that day he could see his father’s eyes. His father stood looking toward the west where the sun had gone and where the wind was rising out of the darkness.
Imagine writing that paragraph. Imagine writing even the first sentence of that paragraph. None of it would pass muster for any self-respecting middle school English teacher. But it gets worse… or better:
His father’s eyes searched the coming of the night in the deepening redness beyond the rim of the world and those eyes seemed to contemplate with a terrible equanimity the cold and the dark and the silence that moved upon him and then all was dark and all was swallowed up and in the silence he heard somewhere a solitary bell that tolled and ceased and then he woke.
Some will find this turgid and absurd. But then, McCarthy knew what he was up to, knew he was violating every notion of “economical” language. So why the verbosity?
It seems to me that McCarthy wanted his words to convey a visceral sense of reality. More than building blocks for stories, his words strain to articulate what the world is like and what the world is like for humans, a distinction I draw deliberately; one often gets the sense that McCarthy’s characters inhabit a world that far exceeds their understanding, that the universe is more ancient and chaotic and arcane than we tend to suppose. Yet this hardly deters McCarthy’s omniscient narrator from toeing the mystical frontiers of language as he attempts to disclose the nature of the human condition.
(Which, by the way, helps explain why Blood Meridian contains over four hundred similes, according to one attentive reader. Metaphoric language seeks to evoke a sense of what some aspect of experience is like. It is the language of philosophers and poets, among whom McCarthy could hold his own.)
Admittedly, the vision of the human condition in Blood Meridian is a bleak one, rife with gratuitous violence alongside extravagant natural beauty. One moment we read of dead men “hanging head downward from the limbs of a fireblacked paloverde tree,” the next of “frayed wires of lightning that stood again and again along the western terminals of the world.” McCarthy’s elevated style attempts to bear the world’s excesses, making us feel the weight. A friend of mine calls Blood Meridian a godless novel. It is at least a novel of godlessness.
McCarthy seemed to share Annie Dillard’s view that creation is profligate. “The whole show has been on fire from the word go,” she writes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.” McCarthy’s incandescent prose helped him evoke a sense of our fiery world. Like Melville before him, he reminds us that effective writing need not always adhere to the logic of efficiency. Sometimes an entire chapter on squid is actually in order. Some half moons can only be compared to “a child’s boat in the gap of the black paper mountains.” The whole world sparks and flames.
McCarthy’s faith in language seemed to wane over his career. His later novels employ a more measured style with simple Hemingwayan sentences. Books like All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, while fine stories, lack the linguistic dynamism of a younger McCarthy. And the two protagonists of his final two novels, a physicist and a mathematician, apparently represent McCarthy’s own turn to science and math to explain ultimate reality. Had words finally failed him?
Either way, Blood Meridian remains McCarthy’s masterpiece, in my view, because of its brazen embrace of words and its unflinching vision of the world. Unless you are some sort of neo-gnostic, you will find parts of this anti-western novel offensive. We need not endorse its harrowing vision, however, to learn something about the power of art to disclose reality in a new light, or conceal it in a new darkness. We inhabit a wild and prodigal world. McCarthy will be remembered as one of our great novelists because he found language to help us feel that fact. Such language, though finite, may even help believers recall what it means to worship a God whom the Scriptures hail—without wasting a word—as holy, holy, holy.
Cameron Brooks
Writer & Poet
Cameron is a writer from South Dakota. His poems have appeared in Poetry East, Ad Fontes, North Dakota Quarterly, The North American Anglican, Red Ogre Review, and elsewhere. You can follow Cameron on Instagram or check out his Substack.
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Alright you’ve convinced me to read his books
This is wonderful — loved reading your thoughts on his word craft.