Blood Meridian
- This topic has 15 replies, 6 voices, and was last updated Feb 28, 2008 at 6:08 pm by
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I love “Islands in the Stream”! The blending of Kenney Rogers and Dolly’s voices is just gorgeous. ;D
Anyhoo, Zach, all that experimentation you attribute to Faulkner comes, of course, from Joyce. Faulkner just gave it a Southern accent and introduced black vernacular. Both Faulkner and (surprising to some) Hemingway were huge Joyce fans.
As for the grammarian in you that wants to fix McCarthy’s punctuation: would you also want to fix all the crooked lines on a Picasso? I can guarantee you that McCarthy knows all the rules of punctuation. Part of being a brilliant writer is bending the rules for effect. One of my favorite examples of this is Dispatches, by Michael Herr, for my money the best book about Viet Nam and the best nonfiction book ever, from a stylistic perspective.
One of my favorite examples of this is Dispatches, by Michael Herr, for my money the best book about Viet Nam and the best nonfiction book ever, from a stylistic perspective.
Have you read The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien? Another great book about Vietnam.
One of the things I always tell people who want to read Ulysses or Faulkner or Pound, etc. etc. is this: You do not have to understand everything you read in order to enjoy it. There are times to simply let words and images wash over you. Yes there is a point of diminishing returns (viz Finnegans Wake), but you don’t have to read everything as if you’re gonna have to write a paper on it later. When you look at a painting, do you try to “understand” every brushstroke? Sometimes it’s great when a powerful piece of writing strikes you on a level beyond or below understanding. Sometimes I think that high-school English actually ruins reading for a lot of people.
Rich, I have read and do admire The Things They Carried, but if you’ve read Dispatches, you’ll see it’s a completely different kind of writing. Herr tries to capture the manic insanity of the war not just by describing it, but by representing it in the writing itself. I once had a semi-famous fishing writer tell me he didn’t like Dispatches because “it doesn’t have much of a plot,” and I wanted to cock-punch him. Talk about missing the point….
Here’s how Dispatches opens:
There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I’d lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off. That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn’t real anymore. For one thing, it was very old. It had been left there years before by another tenant, probably a Frenchman, since the map had been made in Paris. The paper
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