Noel has been on a big Cormac McCarthy kick lately, and has been hinting, with an increasingly wounded attitude, that I ought to give him a shot. (This all stems back to my habit of generally disliking the movies that Noel wants me to watch...now he's paranoid that I hate everything he recommends.) Anyway, I've been meaning to give McCarthy a chance; after all he's won a lot of prizes, and is fairly well respected, so it can't be that bad (even if Noel likes it).
Then last night Noel and Marshall were talking about which McCarthy books they prefer, and I decided that it was time to finally start one. The only ones we actually own are The Road, and No Country for Old Men, and Noel said that of the two he preferred The Road, so I started reading it in spite of my prior resolution to never read an Oprah Book Club pick.
I have to admit that so far it's pretty good, but I'm only on page 90, so things could change. I like the grim imagery of the book, and how McCarthy doesn't explain too much, he gives his readers some credit for logical deduction, which is nice. What really irritates me is his apparent aversion to punctuation. For a while I was trying to decide why some words deserve apostrophes, and others don't, but I think I finally figured it out: he puts apostrophe's for contractions of words + had, but not words + not. i.e. He'd use some markings, but he didnt use others. This to me is both annoying and pretentious. First of all it's annoying because every time he doesnt use an apostrophe, it totally distracts me from the sentence...much as typos in a book always do. Secondly it's pretentious because I don't understand why McCarthy seems to think he's above the normal rules of punctuation. Why not use the apostrophe? It wouldn't be that much harder. I wouldn't even object to the lack of quotation marks if only there were more apostrophes.
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7 comments:
I actually googled "Why doesn't cormac mccarthy use punctuation marks" and found your blog. It annoys me beyond all reason. I read The Road and really liked it, but I tried his most famous novel Blood Meridian, and I simply can't read it. There are no denotations for dialogue AT ALL(I think The Road had single quotes). The first line of the book was also: "See the child." Pretentious City, U.S.A.
Yeah, my husband keeps trying to get me to read more McCarthy...but I just don't think I can handle the lack of punctuation again!! I'm all for distinctive style, but not one that distracting!
I googled "cormac mccarthy doesn't use punctuation" and found Mar's comment on your blog.
I'm reading The Road and I am enjoying it but the punctuation is distracting. I hate getting to the end of a line and finding out that the sentance was something he said. It makes me reread the sentance, which totally ruins any form of immersion in the story world. Perhaps because of this it might be one of the few occaions where the film will end up better than the book.
I hardly think this pretentious: spoken English rarely includes the un-contracted form of contractions anymore, so we insert what has become a rather vestigial mark?
I take it you don't like Faulkner or Steinbeck either, who felt that 'appropriate' punctuation of their time was also unnecessary.
Creative writers are above the rules for punctuation (and grammar, and usage, and spelling). They are the inventors of the language. If you think about it, you were able to understand McCarthy's contractions despite their nonstandard construction. Your objection to the missing apostrophe is merely because you were taught to expect them, not because they are somehow critical to meaning.
Plus, it's a well known fact that when society begins to break down, the apostrophes are always the first thing to go.
I googled, "why doesn't Cormac McCarthy use quotation marks?" and ended up here.
This line cracked me up:
"Plus, it's a well known fact that when society begins to break down, the apostrophes are always the first thing to go."
As to the apostrophe's, I believe he doesn't use them consistently in The Road because it's supposed to be a futuristic world. Presumably, McCarthy believes that the language would have changed in such away that some contractions become words in their own right.
I still don't understand his aversion to quotation marks, however.
While I do not think McCarthys idiosyncratic method of writing dialogue or his not using apostrophes is pretentious, I cant think of a lot of reasons why he would choose to do so.
Perhaps it is to brand himself and to make himself stand out, especially when he still has Joyce to beat; or maybe he just doesnt like quotation marks (which many writers dont: I find them excessive when there are much more moderate techniques available); and as for not using apostrophes: technically they are not needed for meaning, except in cases where the absence of the apostrophe may make the contraction look like another or a real word (he'd, he's, we'll). McCarthy is simply applying his knowledge of this.
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