February 4th: Cormac McCarthy's Aesthetic

Cormac McCarthy



Acclaimed author Benjamin Percy had this to say about Cormac McCarthy's style:

"McCarthy's is an elemental voice. In his voice I hear stone shifting, glaciers cracking open, trees moaning in the wind. The ancient cadences of his prose take on an almost otherworldly quality, a quality that transports you. I'm constantly in awe of the language and recognizing how he's putting together his sentences so exquisitely."

Click here to read more of Percy's take on McCarthy in an article called "Cormac McCarthy's The Road May Have the Scariest Passage in All of Literature."

As we discuss Cormac McCarthy's prose, I would like us to consider these three terms:

AESTHETIC [noun]: a set of principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or artistic movement.

JUXTAPOSE [verb]: to place close together or side by side, especially for comparison or contrast.

SYNTAX [noun]: in linguistics, the way in which linguistic elements (as words) are put together to form constituents (as phrases or clauses).

Cormac McCarthy's lean, muscular prose style is certainly indebted to the legacy of Ernest Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway's prose was influenced in equal parts by his experiences as a newspaper journalist, his avant-garde modernist friends, and his own hyper-masculinist aesthetic.

Here is a fine example of Hemingway's style, an interchapter from his breakthrough short story collection, In Our Time:

CHAPTER VII

While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please christ. If you'll only keep me from getting killed I'll do anything you say. I believe in you and I'll tell everybody in the world that you are the only thing that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shell­ing moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.